Gunmen set off a car bomb to stop a minibus carrying Shiite government employees in northern Baghdad, then shot and killed 15 of them, the government said.
In another attack in the capital on Tuesday, two car bombs went off in a commercial district, killing 15 other Iraqis, police said. 25 people were wounded. The explosions occurred at about 9:45 a.m. near a gas station in Baiyaa, a commercial area of the capital with a mixed Sunni and Shiite population, a policeman said, according to the AP.
The U.S. command said an attack on an American military patrol in Baghdad on Monday killed one soldier and injured five. Another U.S. serviceman died in southern Iraq that day in an accident involving his vehicle.
Meanwhile, US President Bush told one of Iraq's leading Shiite politicians, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, in a White House meeting Monday that Washington was not satisfied with progress in Iraq. "I assured him that the U.S. supports his work and the work of the prime minister to unify the country," Bush said, referring to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "Part of unifying Iraq is for the elected leaders and society leaders to reject the extremists that are trying to stop the advance of this young democracy."
