BAGHDAD — Bombs and gunfire ripped through the end of Ramadan here Thursday, killing at least 24 worshipers and Iraqi soldiers near two Shiite mosques in a worrisome reminder that the drop in violence in recent months can be shattered by successive explosions.
The blasts struck in the early morning of Eid al-Fitr, the feast that ends the holy month of fasting.
Fourteen people, including three soldiers, were killed and 28 injured when a sedan blew up outside a mosque in the Zafaraniya neighborhood of southeastern Baghdad. A man wearing a bomb vest wrestled with a security guard before blowing himself up outside the Rasoul mosque in the eastern New Baghdad district, killing 10 people and injuring nine.
A witness to the Zafaraniya attack, a vendor who gave his name only as Salaam, said that moments before the explosion, he saw a car racing toward the mosque and an Iraqi armored vehicle parked near the entrance. He said the blast created a fireball, setting the armored vehicle and four cars ablaze.
"I feel distressed," said Salaam, who helped evacuate the injured to a hospital in a pickup truck. "Despite all the government assurances that the security situation is improved and Ramadan this year was safe . . . the situation is still bad."
In other attacks, six people, including two children, were killed in Diyala province when gunmen fired on a minibus in Kesaba. An Interior Ministry worker was shot and killed in the southern city of Hillah.
Violence in Iraq has declined significantly in recent months, but Thursday's bloodshed in Baghdad, which appeared to have been carried out by Sunni Arab militants, was the second day of powerful sectarian bombings in less than a week. On Sunday, three blasts in Baghdad killed at least 31 people and injured dozens.
Baghdad is a city of checkpoints as Iraqi forces take over more responsibilities from U.S. troops and citizens test the limits of newfound security. A recent Pentagon report says that civilian deaths across the country were down nearly 80% from June to August compared with the same period last year. But suicide bombers and assassination squads still evade the barbed wire and blast walls.
The Pentagon report concludes that Iraq's progress, spurred in part by the U.S. military buildup and the cooperation of former Sunni militias, is "reversible and uneven."
