Baghdad: A bomb blast killed 23 Iraqi army recruits while they were traveling on a road near Baghdad, hours after a car bomb killed six people in a busy shopping street in the city on Sunday, police said.
The latest attacks supported suggestions from local officials that Sunni militants are regrouping to launch attacks in less secure regions away from Baghdad.
Twenty-seven other recruits from the western Anbar province were injured in the latest blast, while seven others were wounded in the earlier blast in central Baghdad.
The attack follows a devastating suicide car bombing in Emerli, north of Baghdad on Saturday, which left scores dead and levelled at least 100 houses and shops.
The official death toll in the Emerli attack was put at 130 but Mayor Mohammed Rasheed said the death toll could go as high as 150 as rescuers searched through the rubble.
"I heard the cries of my child, then I heard nothing else until I woke in hospital," said Sukaina Abdul Razak, a victim of the Emerli attack.
Shrapnel from the blast killed shoppers hundreds of metres away, wounded grocer Hussain Abu Al Hussain Akbar Aziz said in Kirkuk.
Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki said the "heinous crime" confirmed terrorists are the enemies of all Iraqis and showed that the attackers were "desperate to break the noose closing in upon them".
