50 killed in Baghdad violence

BAGHDAD, Iraq — More than 50 people were killed in Baghdad on Tuesday in violence that included a double suicide bombing near busy entrances to the fortified Green Zone, scattered shootings, mortar attacks, a series of car bombs and the ambush of a bus with Shiite mourners returning from a burial.

Tuesday's killings, many of them apparently executed with sectarian vengeance, raised the three-day death toll in the capital alone to well over 100. Many of the attacks, particularly those in neighborhoods primarily populated by one religious group or another, bore the hallmarks of sectarian militias, both Sunni Arab and Shiite.

At least eight people were slain in insurgent attacks outside the capital, including the wife of a provincial governor, who was killed by a bomb while treating patients at her gynecology clinic. But Tuesday's violence was largely concentrated in Baghdad.

The country's largest Sunni bloc said that in the interest of promoting calm, it would end its 10-day boycott of parliament.

The sudden surge in violence began Sunday morning when a group of Shiite gunmen appeared on the streets of a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad and began killing people. This vigilantism appeared to come as retribution for the bombing of a Shiite mosque the day before, and was then followed by what seemed to be retributive car bomb attacks against another Shiite mosque on Sunday.

Estimates of the number of killings in Baghdad on Sunday range from at least 30 to more than double that number. And at least 30 died in violence on Monday, officials said.

In Tuesday's deadliest attack, two pedestrians wearing vests of explosives blew themselves up near a restaurant outside the walls of the Green Zone, within a few hundred yards of three busy entrances, Iraqi and U.S. officials said. Soon after the initial blasts, a hidden bomb was detonated nearby, adding to the carnage, the U.S. military said.

At least 15 Iraqi civilians and one Iraqi police officer were killed in the blasts, and four people were wounded, according to the U.S. military command.