At least 16 people were killed across Iraq on Monday, including eight troops and four pilgrims, a day after a suicide bomber killed 48 devotees in an attack US officials blamed on Al-Qaeda.
In a brazen late afternoon assault gunmen ambushed a passing Iraqi army patrol in the town of Bohruz in the restive Diyala province, spraying it with bullets and killing seven soldiers and an officer.
Iraqi army Brigadier General Ragib al-Omairi, commander in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, said the attack killed Major Salim Ghaluz and seven men.
Earlier on Monday, a group of Shiite pilgrims heading to the central city of Karbala for the Arbaeen ceremony on Thursday was hit by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, killing four of them, including three women, security officials said.
They said 15 other pilgrims were wounded in the blast.
Tens of thousands of Shiite faithful are vulnerable to attack as they walk to Karbala from across the country to attend the Arbaeen ceremony, the 40th day marking the slaying of a seventh century imam.
The attack came after at least 48 people were killed on Sunday when a suicide bomber detonated a vest filled with explosives at a rest stop used by Shiite pilgrims on their way to Karbala, hospital and security officials said.
At least 68 people were also wounded in the attack in the town of Iskandiriyah just south of Baghdad, medics in the nearby town of Hilla and police said.
The injured were treated in three different hospitals in the area, said a Hilla hospital doctor who declined to give his name.
The American embassy in Baghdad and the US-led forces in Iraq condemned the attack in a joint statement on Monday, blaming it on Al-Qaeda but without saying how they reached this conclusion.
"We will work closely with the government of Iraq and their security forces to help bring the perpetrators of these attacks to justice," the statement said.
Iraq's Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, also condemned the attack, calling it "a new desperate attempt to undermine Iraqi unity and trigger sectarian strife.
"The criminal element behind this brutal and cruel incident directed by a foreign agenda will soon meet its end without any doubt at the hands of the Iraqi people," he said.
Liwa Sumaisim, chief of the political bureau in radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's movement, also condemned the attack and urged Baghdad to "take tough measures to protect the pilgrims during the (Arbaeen) ceremony."
The US military said Iraqi and coalition troops were conducting extra foot patrols and setting up additional checkpoints in a bid to protect pilgrims heading to Karbala for the ceremony.
Shiite pilgrims marching to Karbala have often been targeted by Sunni insurgents in the past.
"There are multiple rings of security in Karbala near the holy shrines and other vulnerable points," said Colonel Tom Jones, a US commander for the Karbala area.
He said the Iskandiriyah attack happened because "one can't secure every piece of land even as massive security arrangements have been made for the Arbaeen ceremony."
In a separate attack on Monday, a handicapped man in a wheelchair wearing an explosives vest blew himself up inside a police building in the central city of Samarra, killing three policemen including a general, officials told AFP.
The bomber came to meet Brigadier General Abdul Jabbar Saleh Rabia, the deputy head of security in Samarra, Iraqi officials said.
A security official in the city said the bomber was allowed to enter the building without being searched because he was handicapped.
"The brigadier general came down from the second floor of the building to meet him. As he came close, the bomber who was in the wheelchair blew himself up and killed General Rabia," the official said.
A woman was also shot dead in Baquba on Monday, police said.
