Iraq Watch: September 15, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Baghdad's city streets once again were filled with violence on Thursday as at least 30 people, most of them Iraqi policemen, were killed in three separate suicide car bombings.

All three of today's VBIED's took place in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora. The first attack occurred early Thursday morning when a suicide bomber rammed his car into a convoy of Iraqi police commandos killing at least 16. A few hours later two suicide car bombs exploded withtin a minute of each other killing another nine Iraqi police.

In eastern Baghdad, a roadside bomb hit an Iraqi Ministry of Industry bus killing at least three civilians and wounding another 13.

Also, police found the bodies of at least eight men, including one polieman, in different parts of the capital.

Clashes erupted between U.S. forces and insurgents in the Sunni city of Ramadi, 70 miles west of the capital, after militant fired mortars at U.S. positions on the outskirts of the city. Armed insurgents could be seen roaming the city's mostly deserted streets on Thursday.

North of Baghdad, in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, two Iraqi policemen were killed and four wounded when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb.

Elsewhere in northern Iraq, a Shiite cleric was killed when a bomb exploded outside of a mosque in Mosul.