BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Sectarian violence broke out between adjacent Sunni Arab and Shiite neighborhoods Tuesday evening, with exchanges of mortar fire and a suicide bombing leaving at least 24 dead.
Separately, authorities discovered at least 20 men killed in apparent sectarian death-squad raids.
Also Tuesday, the U.S. military reported that a U.S. soldier died Monday night of wounds sustained when his vehicle was struck by a bomb in northwest Baghdad. In the southern city of Basra, a British soldier was killed Monday by gunmen in the city's downtown, British army Capt. Tane Dunlop said.
At least seven Iraqis were killed in the mostly Sunni Arab Adhamiya district when a half-dozen mortar rounds landed near the neighborhood's main market. An apparent retaliation came three hours later when a suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt in a cafe along the main street of the mostly Shiite Gri'at neighborhood, killing 17 Iraqis and injuring 21, police officials said.
"We were surprised by a loud boom that shook the place," said Qassem Abed, 55, a customer at the Abu Mohammed Cafe recovering from wounds in Kindi Hospital. "When I woke up, I found myself injured and in the hospital."
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Mustafa Ali, a 47-year-old municipal employee, was about to leave the cafe when he heard the explosion.
"I fainted, and I woke up with injuries, shrapnel in my head and my abdomen," said Ali, who was taken to Kindi. "We have nowhere else to go but this cafe."
Mortar fire has broken out sporadically between adjacent Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods throughout the capital in one of the most ominous signs of open civil war between the rival sects. The Adhamiya and Gri'at neighborhoods, both along the eastern bank of the Tigris River, have been exchanging mortar fire for days, officials said.
