At least eight car bombs exploded across Iraq today killing at least 29 people as insurgents defied a widespread US-Iraqi security clampdown.
Iraqi investigators looks at the remnants of a suicide car bomb which was driven into a crowd of traffic police recruits in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil.
In the Kurdish city of Arbil, a suicide bomber drove his car into a crowd of police recruits, killing at least 12 and wounding about 100 on a soccer field, officials said.
A second such attack in the normally more tranquil Kurdish region killed the security chief of the town of Halabja while another on an Iraqi army checkpoint in the disputed oil city of Kirkuk, just outside Kurdistan, killed four soldiers.
Five car bombs blew up in Baghdad, targeting mostly Iraqi police and soldiers. One struck the notorious airport road.
The wave of violence came as two influential US senators criticised fellow Republican President George W. Bush's handling of the two-year-old war and said Americans needed to be told that US troops faced a “long, hard slog” in Iraq.
The Arbil bombing was the second time in six weeks that such a big bomb has shattered the relative peace of the north, where a regional president was sworn in last week. In early May a suicide bomber killed 46 police recruits in the city.
On Monday, a crowd of around 200 traffic police recruits had gathered for roll call in a dusty field behind the police headquarters when the suicide bomber raced his red vehicle towards them and blew up among them as they scattered.
“Some people were running away but others couldn't move and the car blew up,” said Raeder Mohammed, one of the trainees.