BAGHDAD - Insurgent bomb attacks massacred 35 people in Shia shopping areas of Baghdad on Sunday. Eighteen people died when a booby-trapped car blew up outside a restaurant and a second ripped through a market in the southern Al Shurta Al Arabaa suburb of Iraq’s capital, in bloody defiance of a two-month-old security crackdown. ‘Of those killed 10 are men, five women and three children,’ said a medic at Yarmuk Hospital, adding that 35 wounded were receiving treatment, among them more women and children.As the skeleton of burnt wreckage still smouldered, a bus rigged with bombs exploded in a downtown shopping district in Karrada, killing at least 11 people and wounding 18, defence and security sources said.
In the northern and predominantly Shia district of Ul-Utaifiyah, a suicide bomber boarded a minibus and blew himself up, killing six people and wounding 10, said another security official on condition of anonymity.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki, recently returned from a tour of Asian economic giants Japan and South Korea in a bid to drum up investment for his beleaguered country, slammed the militants for striking at civilians. ‘By targeting vital civil institutions and innocent civilians terrorist groups reveal their failure to confront our armed forces, which are carrying out Operation Fardh Al Qanoon successfully in Baghdad,’ he said in a statement.