Another Safe and Secure Weekend in Baghdad

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BAGHDAD - A car bomb ripped through a wholesale food market in western Baghdad on Sunday, flattening cars and shops and killing at least 30 people in the deadliest of a wave of attacks across Iraq that killed at least 50 people.

The market blast Sunday erupted about noon in the mixed Sunni-Shiite Baiyaa neighborhood and devastated the area, reducing cars and trucks to their charred skeletons and ripping the roofs and exteriors off shops. In addition to the dead, dozens were injured.

Blood pooled in the dirt streets. Hospital officials said two pickup trucks filled with body parts were brought to the morgue.

In other violence Sunday, a car bomb near the Ministry of Labor in Baghdad killed five people and wounded 10, police said.

Insurgents exploded another car bomb outside a police station in the Sunni town of Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, killing four police and a bystander, police said. A few minutes later, militants in the town attacked a police checkpoint near the Askariya shrine, killing another police officer, police said.

In other violence, three U.S. troops were killed in separate attacks, the military said Sunday.

Two Marines were killed Saturday in fighting in Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, and a roadside bomb killed a soldier and wounded four others Friday in western Baghdad, the military said. The deaths raised to at least 3,365 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.