At least 42 people were killed in violence across Iraq today, including 14 mourners from one family when a roadside bomb hit a bus in a southern province.
US soldiers walk in front of a house damaged during a fight with Iraqi insurgence in Baquba. Photograph: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic
Violence has fallen across Iraq by 60 per cent since last June, but today's attacks underlined how fragile those hard-won security gains are.
Police said the bus was carrying members of a family returning from mourning rites for a dead relative in the holy Shia city of Najaf when it was hit about 60 km (40 miles) south of Dhi Qar's capital Nassiriya.
At least 10 and as many as 22 people were wounded in the roadside blast in southern Dhi Qar province.
Police at the general hospital in Nassiriya, 375 km south of Baghdad, said the casualties from the roadside bomb included women and children. Survivors said the bomb appeared to target a passing US military convoy.
In Kut, 170 km southeast of Baghdad, at least 14 people were killed in clashes between security forces and the Mehdi Army militia of anti-US Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. At least 28 people, including at least five policemen, were wounded.
Sadr, who led the Mehdi Army in two uprisings against US forces in 2004, last month renewed a six-month ceasefire first announced last August. That ceasefire has been praised by US commanders for contributing to declining violence.
There was no indication of what caused the Kut clashes, but Sadr issued a statement at the weekend authorising his militia to act in self-defence if they were attacked.
In separate clashes north of the capital, police said four Iraqi policemen, four gunmen and a civilian were killed in an attack on a security checkpoint in Mosul, which the U.S. military says is al Qaeda's last major urban stronghold in Iraq.
In Dhuluiya, also north of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed five people, including three members of a neighbourhood security unit, and wounded 14 in an attack on a checkpoint, police Lieutenant-Colonel Ibrahim al-Jubouri said.
Earlier today, the US military said a roadside bomb had killed three US soldiers and an interpreter in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad yesterday , the same day a suicide bomber killed five US soldiers in the capital.
Yesterday's deaths took to at least 3,983 the number of US troops killed in Iraq.