Baghdad, Iraq – A string of car bombs and other blasts killed at least 54 Iraqis on Tuesday, including 17 outside Baghdad’s most venerated Sunni mosque, while U.S. troops battled Shiite militiamen in Baghdad.
Seven more American soldiers died, the U.S. military said, pushing the December death toll to 90 in one of the bloodiest months for the American troops in Iraq this year.
One hundred five troops were killed in October.
President Bush is weighing whether to send thousands more troops to Iraq, but a senior Democratic senator, Joe Biden, said Tuesday that he would fight such a move.
The 82nd Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade, which would include as many as 3,300 soldiers, has been ordered to go to Kuwait shortly after the new year, senior defense officials said Tuesday. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved the deployment, which had been reported earlier this month, said officials who requested anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made public.
In the most lethal incident Tuesday, three parked cars exploded one after another in western Baghdad, police and Iraqi media reported. The blasts killed 25 people and wounded 55, one physician said by telephone, as he watched the victims being carried into Yarmouk hospital.
The doctor, who has provided information in the past, spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
Perhaps the most politically significant attack came in Aza miyah, a Sunni enclave of Iraq’s capital, where a car bomb exploded near the Abu Hanifa mosque, according to Iraqi media.
That blast killed 17 and wounded 35, said a physician at the nearby Nuaman hospital.
U.S. troops, meanwhile, exchanged fire with Shiite militiamen in east Baghdad, near Sadr City, the stronghold of anti- American cleric Muqtada al- Sadr.
An AP reporter embedded with the soldiers watched the Americans set up roadblocks, occupy homes and engage in gun battles with militia fighters across the border of Sadr City.
Elsewhere, Jordanian Prime Minister Marouf al-Bakhit said Tuesday that a former Iraqi Cabinet minister who escaped from a Baghdad prison this month had arrived in Jordan on a U.S. plane.
Ayham al-Samaraie, a former minister of electricity with dual U.S. and Iraqi citizenship, was serving time for corruption when he escaped in mid-December.
Lou Fintor, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the U.S. government was not involved in al-Samaraie’s escape “in any way.”
