Iraq Attacks Kill 11

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Bombings, gunfire and mortars across Iraq left at least 11 people dead and more than a dozen wounded, police said Tuesday.

Assailants attacked a Sunni mosque in the western Ghazaliyah neighborhood of Baghdad with guns and grenades, killing a guard and torching two rooms, police Capt. Qassim Hussein said. Gunmen ambushed police when they responded, wounding five officers, Hussein said.

In the same neighborhood, a mortar shell wounded a worshipper as he emerged from a Shiite mosque after dawn prayers — one of several rounds that slammed into the city Tuesday morning.

A roadside bomb targeting a U.S. patrol in Baghdad's western Khadhra neighborhood killed one bystander and injured another, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said. There were no reports of American casualties.

A car bomb missed another U.S. patrol in the mostly Shiite Zafaraniyah neighborhood in southeastern Baghdad, wounding at least four civilian bystanders, police Lt. Ahmad Adab said at the scene.

Two car bombs also exploded almost simultaneously at separate sites in the mostly Shiite city of Hillah on Tuesday, wounding at least three people, police said. Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, is the site of the single deadliest attack in the two-year Iraqi insurgency, a homicide car bombing outside a medical clinic on Feb. 28, 2005 that killed 110 people.

Elsewhere, police said four Iraqi officers were killed in two separate attacks on police patrols in Baqouba and Beiji, north of Baghdad. The assailants were not identified.

Gunmen shot and killed a Baghdad International Airport employee as he drove through the southern Saydiyah neighborhood, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said. The motive for the attack was not immediately clear.

Police found four more bullet-ridden bodies — two of them with their eyes gouged out — dumped in parts of the city.