Car bombings and shootings killed 20 people and wounded more than 100 in Baghdad yesterday as Washington stepped up pressure for Shiite Premier-designate Jawad Al-Maliki to form a government and halt IraqÂ’s slide into civil war. Insurgents set off seven car bombs, two of them at a Baghdad university, security officials said. Five people died in the coordinated attack on the Mustansiriya University that also wounded 25.
A car bomb in the north Baghdad neighborhood of Bab Al-Muhaddam killed three people and wounded 25, while another in Tahrir Square in the city center wounded 15. Two car bombs also went off within minutes of each other in east Baghdad, wounding nine.
A seventh bomb exploded in the upscale Mansur neighborhood, wounding seven. Six people died in a series of shootings in south BaghdadÂ’s restive Al-Dura district, while one civilian was killed near the restive city of Baquba, north of the capital.
Thirty-two bodies of Iraqi police and security forces recruits were discovered in two areas of Baghdad yesterday, Interior Ministry sources said. All 32 were from the town of Ramadi in the insurgent heartland of Anbar province, which is fiercely opposed to the government, the sources said.
One group of 17 were kidnapped and then shot dead after they signed up for the police force one week ago. They were found in the Baghdady district of the capital.
The other 15 were found bullet-riddled in two cars in Abu Ghraib, on the western edge of Baghdad. “All the men had bullets in their heads,” an Interior Ministry official said. Further north, four police and two insurgents were killed in clashes near ousted President Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, police said.