A suicide bomber blew himself up among a crowd of Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad and another detonated his explosives inside a cafe north of the capital, the deadliest of several attacks across Iraq today that killed at least 48 people.
The killings, which also included attacks on journalists and anti-extremist Sunni fighters, are part of the deadliest surge in violence to hit Iraq in five years. The accelerating bloodshed is raising fears that the country is falling back into the spiral of violence that brought it to the edge of civil war in the years after the 2003 US-led invasion.
The pilgrims were targeted late today as they passed through the largely Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah en route to a prominent shrine in the nearby Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, according to police officials.
At least 24 people, including four policemen manning the checkpoint, were killed and 50 others were wounded, the officials said.
Around the same time, another suicide bomber blew himself up in a cafe in the town of Balad, a largely Shiite town surrounded by Sunni communities about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad. Balad Mayor Malik Lefta said at least 13 people were killed and 22 were wounded in that attack. He said the cafe was the same one hit by a deadly suicide bombing in August.
A hidden bomb also exploded inside a cafe in the religiously mixed Baghdad neighborhood of Baiyaa, killing three people and wounding 13, police said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the day's violence. Al-Qaida's Iraq arm often deploys suicide bombers and targets Shiite civilians in an effort to undermine confidence in the Shiite-led government.
Earlier, gunmen shot dead a reporter and a cameraman for the privately owned al-Sharqiya TV channel while they were working on a report in the northern city of Mosul, according to police. The city is a former Sunni insurgent stronghold that has been one of the hardest areas of Iraq to tame.
Al-Sharqiya identified the correspondent as Mohammed Karim al-Badrani and the cameraman as Mohammed Ghanem. It was not immediately clear why they were targeted.
At least six members of Sunni militias opposed to al-Qaida were also killed today. The militiamen were members of the Sahwa, which joined US troops in the fight against al-Qaida at the height of Iraq war.
