Insurgent car bombers blitzed the Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk on Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 62 in five brutal attacks, including one on a school training young women teachers.
Brigadier General Adel Ibrahim of the Kirkuk police said three of the blasts were triggered by suicide car bombers, one was a booby-trapped car and another a makeshift bomb planted in a residential neighbourhood.
In one of the attacks, a bomber detonated a car laden with explosives in front of a school which trains young women aged between 16 and 20 to become teachers, killing two of the students and wounding 25 more, he said.
"A suicide bomber blew himself up as the girls were leaving the school. Two of them were completely burned in the flames," the brigadier told AFP.
Attacks on female professionals are becoming common in Iraq, where some ultraconservatives are attempting to bomb working women back into their homes and freeze them out of public life.
Another suicide attack killed five members of an Iraqi armed security detail set up to protect government offices, and a third ripped through a crowded street market.
Kirkuk's police chief, Major General Torhan Yussef, told AFP that a total of 11 people were killed and 62 wounded in the wave of explosions.
The blitz came just a week after Iraqi troops carried out a major security operation in the divided oil city, imposing a curfew and launching house searches in an apparently unsuccessful a bid to root out militants.
Leaders of Iraq's Kurdish minority want Kirkuk and its rich oilfields to become part of northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, an idea fiercely opposed by the city's Arab and Turkmen communities.
Ousted dictator Saddam Hussein altered the city's ethnic make-up by driving out Kurds and pursuing a policy of forced Arabisation. Since his fall in 2003 there have been tensions between returning Kurds and the new residents.
A referendum will decide the city's political fate next year, but in the meantime it has become the target of Arab extremists opposed both to Kurdish ambitions and Iraq's embattled US-backed government.
Meanwhile, violence continued elsewhere in the country, including in the war-torn capital, which is in the grip of a savage wave of sectarian violence with rival Shia and Sunni death squads competing to slaughter civilians.
The US military also announced the deaths of three US soldiers in south Baghdad when a roadside bomb destroyed their vehicle on Saturday, bringing the number of Americans killed in the first two weeks of the month to 50.
Their deaths bring to 2,759 the number of US servicemen killed in action or from other causes in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
In Baghdad, bombers targeted a convoy carrying Hala Mohammed Shakr, head of the interior ministry's financial affairs department, killing two bodyguards and five civilian bystanders, Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf said.
The capital's Al-Kindi hospital reported receiving eight wounded civilians.
Elsewhere in the city, a bomb exploded next to a passing convoy of security contractors, setting a vehicle ablaze and killing two bystanders, police said.
The blast on Ghadir Street in south-east Baghdad also wounded five people.
Another bomb killed one person and wounded two in the Amil neighbourhood, a confessionally mixed area of south-west Baghdad that has seen a number of attacks.
South of the capital, a policeman and a civilian were killed in separate incidents near the city of Kut. Two bodies partially eaten by fish were pulled out of the Tigris river downstream of the capital near the town of Suweira.