Car bomb kills 11 in central Baghdad

updated 9:56 a.m. ET March 13, 2008

BAGHDAD - An explosion killed at least 11 people and wounded dozens on Thursday after a car bomb detonated in a commercial district of central Baghdad, adding to a recent upsurge in Iraq's violence.

Explosives in the parked car went off just outside the heavily fortified Green Zone. It's the latest in a string of attacks after several months of relative calm linked to last year's U.S. security buildup.

• Also on Thursday, Iraqi police and a morgue official said that the body of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop kidnapped last month was found just outside the northern city where he was abducted.
• Earlier, the U.S. military said that an Iraqi girl was killed after American troops fired a warning shot at a woman who "appeared to be signaling to someone" along a road where several bombs have recently been found.
• In other violence, five members of an Awakening Council were killed when unidentified gunmen attacked two separate checkpoints near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. Nine others were wounded in the attacks. Awakening Councils are made up of mostly Sunni fighters who have accepted U.S. backing to switch allegiances and fight al-Qaida in Iraq.

Sharp increase in attacks
The violence comes amid a sharp increase in attacks resulting in the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, where 12 Americans have been killed in the past four days. Most recently three soldiers died on Wednesday in a rocket attack on Combat Outpost Adder near Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad.

The attack came a day after an American soldier died when a roadside bomb hit his patrol near Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad.

Eight soldiers were killed in a pair of bomb attacks on Monday, the heaviest single day of U.S. casualties since September.

Three of those soldiers died in a roadside bombing in Diyala, a violent province where al-Qaida in Iraq has been active. The five others were killed when approached by a suicide bomber while on foot patrol in central Baghdad.

The Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni militant group, issued a statement Wednesday claiming responsibility for the soldiers' deaths.

With the overall U.S. military death toll in Iraq nearing 4,000, Wednesday's killings mark a significant rise in deadly attacks against Americans.

At least 3,987 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an AP count. The figure includes eight military civilians.

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