Dozens Killed in Bomb Blasts Across Iraq

(April 23) -- A wave of bombings reverberated across Iraq's capital and into western Anbar province today, killing more than 60 people in a return to the kind of large-scale bloodshed that used to engulf Baghdad daily just a few years ago.

Today's violence, the bloodiest in Iraq in weeks, came less than a week after al-Qaida in Iraq's two top leaders were killed in a U.S. airstrike, severing the leadership of the extremist Sunni group thought to be responsible for the bulk of Iraq's most brutal bombings.

The wave of more than half a dozen blasts today also wounded more than 110 people. No claims of responsibility were issued.

Violence has plummeted in Iraq since 2008, when Washington flooded the country with more troops and made key pacts with tribal leaders and former Sunni insurgents willing to turn against al-Qaida. But attacks have escalated in recent weeks, after a March 7 parliamentary election failed to yield a clear winner.

The fear is that political uncertainty could re-ignite buried sectarian hatred that flared out of control after the last parliamentary polls in 2005, which ushered in a period of fierce fighting that left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead.

Many of today's attacks appeared to target Shiite Muslims, considered to be apostates under al-Qaida's extremist Sunni ideology. Bombing Shiite mosques is a hallmark of al-Qaida's tactics.

"Targeting prayers in areas with a certain [Shiite Muslim] majority," Baghdad security spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi told Reuters, "is a revenge for the losses suffered by al-Qaida. ... We expect such terrorist acts to continue."

Among the blast sites was the main Baghdad office of Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist Shiite cleric who has lobbied for the U.S. to pull out of Iraq. Al-Sadr is living now in neighboring Iran.

Two car bombs also blew up nearby in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, a Shiite Muslim slum named after al-Sadr's father, also a prominent cleric who was murdered under Saddam Hussein. The area is a sprawling and crowded slum that's home to about 1 million of the city's poorest residents. The bombs were apparently timed to target Shiite worshippers scurrying to and from mosques on the Muslim day of prayer when many Iraqis are off work and gather to worship with family.

In another mostly Shiite neighborhood, Hurriyah, another car bomb killed worshippers outside the Hadi al-Chalabi mosque. Others died in an explosion at a marketplace in a northern part of Baghdad.

Police and hospital officials described the attacks and gave casualty figures to reporters from several news agencies.

West of Baghdad, homemade bombs were planted between houses in the Anbar province town of Khaldiya, in an area where a prominent police officer and judge live. The blasts killed at least seven people and wounded 10 others. It's unclear whether the policeman and judge were killed, but members of their families were among the casualties.

Anbar, home to the once restive cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, is a vast desert province that stretches westward from Baghdad out to the Syrian, Jordanian and Saudi Arabian borders. Early in the Iraq war, it was the center of Iraq's Sunni Muslim insurgency, and foreign fighters from across the Middle East made their bases there.

But in 2007, some prominent Sunni tribal leaders switched sides, ousting al-Qaida-linked militants from their lands, and joined forces with American troops and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. Since then, violence has subsided in Anbar, though some small-scale attacks are still common.