Violence keeps devastating Iraq 16 dead and 14 wounded in Baghdad attacks

Violence keeps devastating Iraq 16 dead and 14 wounded in Baghdad attacks : Sixteen people, including nine security force members, were killed and 14 wounded on Thursday in a string of attacks in the Iraqi capital's Sunni district of Al-Adhamiyah, the interior ministry said.

Assailants set ablaze the bodies of three soldiers in Al-Adhamiyah after shooting them dead, the ministry said. Three homemade bomb attacks on different routes to the scene of the shooting killed 13 more people, including three soldiers and three policemen, and wounded 14, among them seven police and two civil defense members, it said.

The ministry said the attacks all took place within a 15-minute timeframe. Also on Thursday, three soldiers were killed and 12 wounded when an insurgent detonated a car bomb near an army base in Al-Sharqat, 300 kilometers (190 miles) north of Baghdad in Salaheddin province, a police officer said.

In the western city of Fallujah, 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of Baghdad, two roadside bombs targeting Iraqi army patrols killed two Iraqi soldiers and wounded eight others, police and hospital officials in the city said.

In the northern city of Mosul, a bomb attached to a police vehicle killed one policeman and injured two others, a police official in the city said.

Mosul has remained a hotbed of insurgent activity even as levels of violence have decreased in other areas of Iraq.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned of the dangers of an upsurge in violence as negotiations on forming a new governing coalition drag on, more than four months after the country held a parliamentary election.

Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda's front group in Iraq said it carried out this week's car bomb attack on Al-Arabiya television's offices in Baghdad that killed four people.

The Islamic State of Iraq "claimed responsibility for the July 26th suicide bombing that struck the offices of Al-Arabiya Television in Baghdad," the SITE monitoring group said, citing a statement on jihadist web forums.

More than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, insurgents are increasingly targeting Iraqi security forces, as all but 50,000 U.S. troops prepare to leave the country by the end of August.

As part of a security agreement between the United States and Iraq, all American troops must leave Iraq by the end of 2011.