Ramadi, July 21: Five people were killed and about 40 wounded in bomb attacks on Tuesday in Baghdad and the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, security and medical officials said.
The deadliest attack was in Ramadi, where three people were killed and 10 wounded in a double car bombing outside a restaurant in the northern district of Al-Jazira, hospital officials and police said.
It was the second deadly car-bomb attack in as many days in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, once a bastion of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
In Baghdad, two people were killed and 30 more wounded when two bombs exploded in the Shiite slum district of Sadr City on Tuesday, security sources said.
Also in the capital, Water Resources Minister Abdel Latif Jamal Rashid escaped a bomb attack as his convoy drove through the central district of Karrada, the sources said. Six passers-by were wounded when the bombs exploded near a bridge.
On Monday, 10 people were killed, including seven policemen and a soldier, in attacks in Ramadi and the northern city of Mosul.
The spate of attacks come just three weeks after US troops withdrew from urban centres in line with a security pact between Baghdad and Washington that calls for American forces to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.
Violence had dropped markedly throughout the country in recent months, but attacks increased in the run-up to the US military pullback, with 437 Iraqis killed in June — the highest death toll in 11 months.
Attacks remain common in Baghdad and Mosul.
–Agencies