Bombs in Baghdad and northern Iraq killed at least 41 people and wounded more than 80 today, just over a week after US troops handed security in city centres to local forces.
The attacks in the north, where tensions between Arabs and Kurds threaten to flare into Iraq's next conflict, appeared to be part of an attempt by insurgents to reignite sectarian fighting following the partial US pullback.
Two suicide bombings in Tal Afar, a town in volatile Nineveh province that is mainly home to minority Turkmen of the Shia Muslim faith, killed 34 people and wounded 60, police said.
One suicide bomber detonated an explosives vest in the historic centre of the town, 420km northwest of Baghdad, followed by another suicide attack just as people responded to the first blast.
Nineveh and its main city Mosul have suffered a steady series of attacks since June 30th, when US troops withdrew from urban centres. It is an area where groups like al-Qaeda have taken advantage of tensions between Sunni Arabs, ethnic Kurds and other minorities to sustain a stubborn insurgency.
In Baghdad, seven people were killed and 20 wounded by two bombs in a market in Sadr City, a poor, Shia Muslim area. Police said both bombs were placed among rubbish piles in the popular market.
The worst of the bloodshed between Shias and Sunnis set off by the 2003 US invasion has faded, but violence in ethnically mixed Nineveh reflects lingering divisions among Iraqis, and underscores the fragility of security gains.
Mistrust is still strong between the Sunni Muslims who dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein and majority Shias.
In the city of Baiji north of Baghdad on Thursday, Iraqi police clashed in a violent gunfight with a US-backed Sunni neighbourhood guard unit, and ended up arresting around 15, Iraqi police and US military officials said.
The reasons for the incident were unclear, but the Shia-led government is suspicious of the guards, known as Awakening Councils, because many of them used to be allies of al-Qaeda until they decided to join up with U.S. forces.
However, tensions in one area were potentially reduced on Thursday when US forces released five Iranians described by Tehran as diplomats but accused by Washington of arming and funding Shia militias in Iraq and using them to target US troops and Sunni opponents.
Iranian state television said three of the men were diplomats detained in a 2007 US raid in Iraq's northern city of Arbil, while the rest were "two other Iranians kidnapped elsewhere in Iraq by the U.S. occupation troops".
The men were handed over first to Iraqi authorities and then released into the care of Iranian embassy staff, it reported.
Reuters