Car bombs ripped through Shiite pilgrims near Baghdad while militants attacked a city council headquarters and a police station, as Iraq-wide violence killed at least 66 people today, officials said.
The killing of the pilgrims underscored the danger of sectarian violence in Iraq, while the attacks on the city council and police station in Salaheddin province showed the impunity with which militants can strike even targets that should be highly secure.
Violence in Iraq has reached a level not seen since 2008, when the country was emerging from a period of brutal sectarian killings, and has raised fears it is slipping back into all-out conflict.
In the Rashid area south of Baghdad, two car bombs targeted Shiite pilgrims, killing at least 22 people and wounding at least 52, security and medical officials said.
Sunni militants including those linked to Al-Qaeda frequently target members of Iraq's Shiite majority, whom they consider to be apostates.
In the city of Tikrit, militants detonated a car bomb near the city council headquarters and then occupied the building, with employees still inside.
Iraqi security forces surrounded the building, and then carried out an assault that Counter-Terrorism Service spokesman Sabah Noori said freed 40 people who were held inside.
"We freed all the hostages" and killed one suicide bomber, while two others blew themselves up, Noori told AFP.
A police major and a doctor said that a city council member and two police were killed, though it was unclear whether they died during the initial attack or the later assault by security forces.
The assault came after suicide bombers struck a police station in the town of Baiji, also in Salaheddin province.
One bomber detonated a car bomb at the gate of the station, after which three entered, shot dead an officer and a policeman, and waited inside.
SWAT security forces then attacked the station, killing one of the militants, while the other two blew themselves up, killing three police.
Gunmen also killed three soldiers guarding an oil pipeline near Tikrit, while two oil protection police were killed and three wounded by a bomb south of the northern city of Kirkuk.
The second-deadliest attack today was in the northern city of Mosul, where militants gunned down 12 people on a bus.
Also today, five other car bombs and a magnetic "sticky bomb" on a vehicle exploded in and around the Iraqi capital, killing at least 17 people and wounding at least 43 -- the second series of blasts in the area in 24 hours.
