[Al Arabiya Latest] A spate of bloody car bombings rocked Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad on Monday, killing 37 people and wounding at least 140 others in an escalation of violence as the United States prepares to pull combat troops out of cities by a June 30 deadline.Six car bombs shattered the city's fragile security situation just as British business minister Peter Mandelson arrived in Baghdad. Among the dead were at least two women and a baby.
Angry survivors hurled stones at Iraqi soldiers at the site of one of the blasts in Sadr City after troops fired shots in the air to disperse crowds of people trying to care for the injured, witnesses said.
Bloody bombings across Baghdad
During the morning rush hour 10 people were killed and 65 wounded when a booby-trapped car exploded in a market area of the impoverished Shiite district of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.
Another car bomb in the central Allawi district killed six people and wounded 25 others. Most of the victims were workers waiting for jobs, a defense ministry official said.
Emergency teams moved in fast to clean up the pieces of twisted metal and the remains of a mangled white sedan. Storefronts were closed, many of them damaged.
A car bomb targeting the convoy of a senior interior ministry official killed one civilian and a policeman and wounded six other policemen in the southeastern Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad. The official, a brigadier general identified as Sadun, was unhurt.
Bombings still too common
And in Shiite Hussainiya, in the city's far northeast, four people were killed and 20 were wounded when a vehicle exploded near a market.
The violence continued later in the day and shortly after noon twin car bombs tore through a popular medical clinic and a crowded bazaar, killing 12 and wounding 23 in Um al-Maalif just west of the city centre, defense and interior ministry officials said.
The attacks come after deadly clashes in Baghdad between Iraqi troops and former Sunni insurgents, now turned anti-Qaeda militants, over the arrest of their leader on criminal charges.
Despite improving security, bombings remain all too common in the capital, and the latest attacks came as Mandelson led Britain's first official trade delegation to Baghdad for more than 20 years.
The business delegation, on a one-day visit, was also to visit Basra in the south, a British embassy official said.
Also on Monday, seven Iraqi soldiers were wounded when a man exploded a suicide vest inside the house they were raiding in Balad, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) north of Baghdad.
In addition, an American soldier was killed on Monday in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, a U.S. military statement said.