At Least 39 Killed in Wave of Attacks in Iraq

BAGHDAD — A wave of attacks across Iraq on Thursday killed more than 100 people on Thursday, including dozens of women and children at an amusement park, security and medical officials said.¶ The attacks, a series of car bombings, roadside bombings and armed assaults in Baghdad and five other provinces, also killed army security officers, police officers as well as civilians.

The attacks, mounted as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan drew to a close, were a further escalation of violence that had already claimed scores of lives across the country since Ramadan began in late July and since the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq said it would begin an offensive.

A car packed with explosives detonated near the amusement park in Zaafaraniya, a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, killing 34 people and wounded 57 more, most of them women and children, officials said. Earlier in the day, two roadside bombs detonated in the same neighborhood, killing 2 civilians and wounding 11. In northern Baghdad, two more car bombs exploded near a government building where people were gathered to file documents. Those daytime attacks left at least 7 dead and 42 wounded, according to the police. In the evening, a parked car blew up near a crowded cafe about 300 feet from a military checkpoint in Sadr City, a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, killing 23 civilians and wounding 58, security officials said.

After the Sadr City attack, angry civilians pelted security forces with stones, saying they had allowed the explosives-filled car to pass the checkpoint without being inspected.

Gunmen carrying weapons equipped with silencers killed 10 Iraqi soldiers at a military outpost in Meshahda, northwest of Baghdad, and two policemen and two others at Falluja west of the capital.

In northern Iraq, six car bombs exploded in Kirkuk, four of them at a Kurdish political party’s headquarters during a celebration and two at the North Oil Company building. Seven people were killed in those two attacks. South of the city, a suicide bomber detonated his bomb inside a police antiterrorism office, killing 11 security officers and wounding 25. Gunmen in Mosul killed two civilians and kidnapped another when they stormed a house looking for policemen, and a suicide bomber killed five and wounded 24 in a café north of Mosul, police officials said.

In Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad, the police said four Iraqi soldiers on patrol were killed and two were wounded by a roadside bomb. The attack was followed by heavy gunfire northeast of Baquba, and a few minutes later by a car bombing that wounded four civilians.

Insurgents also attacked several police checkpoints in Baqubam killing four police officers and wounding four more, and the police said they killed a leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq in a clash in the western part of the city.