A series of attacks, car bombs and mortar barrages rocked Baghdad on Tuesday, killing at least 66 people and injuring scores.
In the south Tuesday, two British soldiers died in Amarah, 290 kilometers from Baghdad, the Defense Ministry reported in London. A witness said a car bomb targeted a British patrol, the AP reported.
Also Tuesday, gunmen in two speeding cars opened fire on the Sunni al-Salam mosque in the western Baghdad's Mansour district, killing the guard, said police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq.
A car bomb hit the Abdel Hadi Chalabi mosque in Hurriyah, killing 23 and wounding 55, police said. Mortar fire at the Shiite Imam Kadhim shrine in the Kazimiyah neighborhood on the opposite side of the Tigris River killed one and wounded 10, police said.
In the mostly Shiite New Baghdad neighborhood, a car bomb targeting a police patrol killed five people and wounded 15. Another car bomb hit a small market opposite the Shiite Timimi mosque in the mostly Shiite Karradah neighborhood, killing six people and injuring 16, the Interior Ministry said.
A roadside bomb targeting the convoy of a defense ministry adviser killed five soldiers and injured seven others in the eastern Zaiyona neighborhood, ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said. The adviser, Lt. Gen. Daham Radhi al-Assal, escaped unharmed, he said.
The U.S. military reported a U.S. soldier was killed by small-arms fire west of Baghdad on Monday.
Meanwhile, execution-style killings continued with the discovery Tuesday of nine more bullet-riddled bodies, including a Sunni Muslim tribal sheik, off a road southeast of Baghdad, police and hospital officials said.
Deth toll of sectarian violence
Sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of an important Shiite shrine killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, according to Baghdad's main morgue. In a report by the Washington Post it is claimed that the toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media. That figure makes recent days the deadliest of the Iraq war outside major U.S. offensives, it said.
But the Iraqi Cabinet disputed this figure, saying 379 people had been killed and 458 wounded in reprisal attacks.
The US report added hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue. Many of the bodies had their hands still bound. It quoted police sources as saying the majority of the victims had been killed after being taken away by armed men.
The Statistics Department of the Iraqi police put the nationwide toll at 1,020 since Wednesday, but that figure was based on paperwork that is sometimes delayed before reaching police headquarters, the US report said.
