BAGHDAD, Iraq – A string of car bombs and other blasts killed at least 54 Iraqis on Tuesday, including 17 outside Baghdad’s most venerated Sunni mosque, while the U.S. military said seven American soldiers died.
The U.S. deaths push the December death toll to 90, according to an Associated Press count, in one of the bloodiest months for the American troops in Iraq this year. About 105 troops were killed in October.
In the most lethal incident Tuesday, three parked cars exploded one after another in western Baghdad, police and Iraqi media reported. The blasts killed 25 people and wounded 55, one physician said by telephone as he watched the victims being carried into Yarmouk hospital.
A car bomb exploded near the Abu Hanifa mosque, in Azamiyah, a Sunni enclave of Iraq’s capital, according to Iraqi media. That blast killed 17 and wounded 35, said a physician at a nearby hospital.
In another attacks Tuesday, a bomb hidden in a CD player exploded in a busy market district in Baghdad after a man dropped it off at an electronics repair shop. The bomb killed five people and wounded 14, police said. In Kirkuk, a roadside bomb killed three civilians, including an 8-year-old girl, and wounded six others, police said.
U.S. troops, meanwhile, exchanged fire with Shiite militiamen in east Baghdad, near Sadr City, the stronghold of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. U.S. troops crouched on rooftops, hiding behind laundry hanging on a clothesline. Bursts of gunfire ricocheted off rudimentary cement houses.
The gunbattles waned as darkness fell. At least six mortars fell on a U.S. military base nearby, but caused no injuries.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has signed orders that will send the 82nd Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade to Kuwait shortly after the new year, senior defense officials said Tuesday.
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