The dead included three brothers whose charred bodies were found before dawn in Baghdad's Dora district, a mixed Sunni-Shi'ite area and one of the city's most violent.
The deadliest single attack occurred at midmorning when a suicide driver detonated his vehicle near an Iraqi Army patrol leaving its base in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Azamiyah, killing 10 people and injuring 15, most of them Iraqi soldiers, police Lieutenant Colonel Falah al-Mohammedawi said.
A half-hour earlier, a car bomb exploded near the Baghdad offices of the state-run al-Sabah newspaper, killing a civilian employee, police Lieutenant Ahmed Mohammed Ali said. Officials believed the target was a police patrol that passed by shortly before the blast.
In Karbala, a Shi'ite holy city 60 miles south of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber exploded his vehicle near the main provincial government building, killing five people and wounding 19, police spokesman Rahman Mishawi said.
The bomber was unable to reach the government building because of concrete barricades and a police cordon, and instead set off his explosives about 300 yards away, police said.
Elsewhere, three policemen were killed in a roadside bombing in the northern city of Mosul, police said.
Two bodies with gunshot wounds were found in the center of Mosul late yesterday, police said.
In Baghdad, police and unknown gunmen battled for nearly an hour yesterday in the capital's Saydiyah district.
Three policemen wounded and three gunmen were arrested, police said.
US officials have long believed that violence would subside if Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds believed they had a stake in a new unity government representing all the nation's religious and ethnic communities.
The framework of Iraq's new unity government was put in place last month with the selection of a president, vice presidents, prime minister, and Parliament speaker. Incoming Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite, hopes to present his Cabinet to Parliament by Wednesday.
However, a top Shi'ite official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deliberations, said Maliki would probably not meet that target because of differences among the parties over who will run the ministries of interior and defense.
