BAGHDAD — A bomb in a parked car struck worshipers heading to a Shiite mosque Sunday in Baghdad, killing at least nine people as Iraqis celebrated a Muslim holiday, while the death toll rose to 18 in a coordinated suicide truck bombing and ambush north of the capital.
Relatives and rescue workers pulled bodies from under piles of concrete bricks and rubble in the Sunni city of Samarra, where a suicide truck bomber detonated his explosives late Saturday. Guards had opened fire before he could reach the targeted police headquarters.
Gunmen drove up and fought with police immediately after the blast, which tore through nearby buildings. At least 18 people were killed and 27 wounded, police said.
Nobody claimed responsibility for the attacks in Baghdad and Samarra, but they bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda in Iraq militants who had promised an offensive during Ramadan to undermine U.S.-Iraqi claims of success in quelling the violence in the capital with an 8-month-old security operation.
The fasting month ended over the weekend with the three-day Eid al-Fitr festival that began Friday for Sunnis and Saturday for Shiites.
Also killed Sunday were a U.S. soldier struck by a roadside bomb during combat operations in southern Baghdad and an Iraqi journalist who was shot while on assignment for The Washington Post elsewhere in the capital.
Salih Saif Aldin, 32, who wrote under the name Salih Dehema for security reasons, was killed in the neighborhood of Sadiyah, according to a statement from the newspaper.
The soldier’s death brought to at least 3,828 members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The car bombing in Baghdad tore through a minibus that was to carry passengers to the revered Imam al-Kadhim shrine in the northwestern Kazimiyah district.
A 9-year-old boy and two women were among those killed. Police banned cars from the area until further notice, an officer said.
Earlier Sunday, police found a booby-trapped minibus parked in the same area but were able to detonate it without casualties, the officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI made a public appeal in Rome on Sunday for the release of two Catholic priests kidnapped a day earlier on their way home from a funeral in northern Iraq.
Gunmen ambushed the priests’ car, dragged them out and took them away, said Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa, Mosul’s head of the Syrian Catholic Church, one of the branches of the Roman Catholic Church.
The pope asked the kidnappers to let the two religious men go during his traditional Sunday blessing to pilgrims and tourists gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
