Bombs kill 10 in Baghdad's Sadr City

Two bombs in Baghdad's mostly Shiite district of Sadr City killed at least 10 people late on Thursday, security officials said, a day after the capital suffered its worst attacks in more than a month. The latest spike in attacks -- two security force members were also killed in separate incidents -- comes amid discussions between Baghdad and Washington over whether to keep an American training mission in Iraq beyond 2011. The two roadside bombs detonated at around 8:30 pm (1730 GMT) in Al-Hay market in the northern Baghdad district, officials from the interior and defence ministries said. The interior ministry official put the toll at 10 dead and 31 wounded, while the defence ministry official said 10 people were killed and 16 wounded. Both said women and children were among the casualties. Both spoke on condition of anonymity. The interior ministry official also said gunmen shot dead an intelligence officer at a checkpoint in Al-Amil in south Baghdad, while a roadside bomb against an army patrol killed one soldier and wounded two others just outside Tikrit, in Iraq's north. Also on Thursday, police arrested more than 300 people allegedly "involved in implementing terrorist and criminal attacks against security forces," according to Major General Fadhel Raddad, police chief of central Babil province. Thursday's violence came a day after a spate of attacks in the capital mainly targeting security forces, including two suicide car bombs minutes apart against police stations, killed 23 people and wounded more than 70. Those apparently coordinated attacks were the deadliest to hit the capital since August 28, when a suicide attack blamed on Al-Qaeda at Baghdad's biggest Sunni mosque killed 28 people, including an MP. The attacks come with less than three months to go before a year-end withdrawal deadline for the roughly 41,000 US soldiers currently in Iraq, with Baghdad and Washington yet to reach an accord on a post-2011 training mission. Despite a decline in violence nationwide since its peak in 2006 and 2007, attacks remain common. A total of 185 Iraqis were killed in violence in September, according to official figures.