Baghdad Bombings Kill 112

Smoke billows and sirens wail as emergency workers lift the dead in black bags.

The bombings are a brutal reminder of an insurgency's potency ahead of next year's election, and a crucial oilfield contracts auction due this weekend.

A suicide car bomber detonated himself in a courthouse car park after passing a checkpoint.

A second explosion struck a temporary building housing the Finance Ministry, after its main building was devastated in an August bombing.

A third bomber blew up his car while sitting in it near a judge-training center.

[Mohamed Abed, Witness]:
We were stuck in a heavy traffic jam here when a powerful blast took place. A car bomb exploded....A large number of people were wounded and killed.

Pools of blood formed next to charred passenger buses, police vehicles and crumpled cars, strewn across the road near the judicial training center. One bomb left a crater roughly 320 square feet (30 square meters) big in the road.

U.S. soldiers collected evidence at the scene, while Iraqi police looked on.

Iraq's oil ministry says it wont cancel a planned tender of oilfield development contracts that executives from the world's oil majors will attend.

The deals are as crucial to Iraq's efforts to finance the war-torn countrys reconstruction.

The blasts are the first large, high-profile explosions in Baghdad since Oct. 25, when two truck bombs killed 155 people at the Justice Ministry and Baghdad governor's office.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki promises tightened security and the capture of those responsible for the blasts.

On Monday, a smaller blast, which might have involved the accidental explosion of munitions, killed seven children at a school in Sadr City.

Rather than stage frequent smaller-scale attacks against soft targets like marketplaces or mosques, groups like al Qaeda now aim for spectacular and less frequent strikes.

Violence triggered by the 2003, U.S.-led invasion has fallen dramatically.

The health ministry in November reported the lowest monthly death toll of Iraqi civilians in more than six years.

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[GodOfUnbelief]

@Russki08 You dont speak by facts. They are not organized by usa. This is sectarian violence between muslims of different sects, sunni and shia mostly, and also fueled by other society problems.

[Russki08]

Most of the explosions in public placed in Iraq (especially in mosques) were organized by americans to provoke a civil war in Iraq so that the Iraqis kill each other and pay less attention to americans. This is a nasty tactics! Just imagine, would you explode a church being a Christian? The answer is NO! The same is with moslems.

[BrandonJay1983]

What a sad world we live in....