An bomb planted on the bus detonated at a northern entrance to the city, setting fire to the vehicle, two police spokesmen in the area said.
They said the maimed were rushed to hospital.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast.
Such attacks in the mostly Shi'ite Moslem south of Iraq have been rare in recent years, especially after the territorial defeat of Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
in Iraq in 2017 and the routing of its al Qaeda predecessors in the mid-2000s.