BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Suicide bombers, roadside explosions and mortar rounds killed at least 99 Iraqis and wounded another 26 across the country Wednesday. The U.S. military also announced that three American troops had been killed in Anbar province Tuesday.
In downtown Baghdad, Iraqi and American soldiers continued to pursue suspected rebels in the largely Sunni Arab Haifa Street neighborhood, making 15 arrests on the second day of an offensive against insurgents there, Iraqi officials said.
A Ministry of Defense official said raids and searches concluded Wednesday afternoon, and that government troops found four bodies -- apparent casualties of Tuesday's fighting in which at least 51 suspected militants had been reported killed.
Despite the central Baghdad crackdown, 50 bodies were found dumped in a neighborhood near Haifa Street. Another 10 corpses were found across the Tigris River in the Rusafa neighborhood. All appeared to have been shot, execution-style, Iraqi officials said.
Elsewhere in the downtown area of the capital, a bomb exploded, injuring two. A second bomb damaged water pipes near the Sadr City neighborhood, cutting off supplies to parts of the Shiite slum. Three civilians were injured by a third bomb. On Tuesday night, a family of four living in the Shiite slum was killed by a mortar round.
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South of the capital in Mahmoudiya, two car bombs destroyed a gas station, killing one person and injuring three, not far from where the city council was meeting, according to Iraqi officials.
Gunmen attacked a caravan of Shiite pilgrims heading toward the southern city of Karbala, killing 11 and injuring four.
In the north, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives close to a convoy carrying the mayor of Tal Afar, killing one civilian and injuring three police officers, Iraqi officials said. The mayor survived.
In downtown Tal Afar, a suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives killed four civilians and injured another dozen people. In Mosul, police recovered three bodies from various neighborhoods, they said. In Babil, south of Baghdad, authorities recovered another five bodies.
