BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Bomb blasts severely damaged a bridge linking a highway from Baghdad with the northern city of Kirkuk yesterday, the police and witnesses said, heightening tensions between Arabs and Kurds and forcing traffic to detour through some of the most dangerous areas of Diyala province.
An American tank firing at insurgents near Fallujah also killed three Iraqi children yesterday, according to a military statement, and an American helicopter was damaged by gunfire north of Baghdad and forced to land.
In Baghdad, a barrage of mortar shells killed at least seven people. Gunmen assassinated the imam of a Sunni mosque in Ghazaliya, a Sunni area of western Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. The Iraqi police recovered 26 unidentified bodies from different areas of Baghdad.
The destruction of the Sarha bridge, about 100 miles north of Baghdad and one of the busiest crossings for vehicles moving between the capital and Kirkuk, appeared to be part of an effort by Sunni insurgents to isolate Kirkuk and limit interaction between residents of different areas and sects.
Salah al-Mufaraji, a prominent tribal leader who lives near the Sarha bridge, said groups aligned with al-Qaida in Mesopotamia were responsible for the bombing.
"Gunmen move through the area freely amid the absence of the government and because the security forces can't control the area," he said. "All the people living here have announced allegiance to al-Qaida out of fear and because they can't confront it."
Abbas Hilmi, a taxi driver who travels between Baghdad and Kirkuk, said that damage to the bridge would hurt the already hobbled local economy.
"It's miserable," he said. "We're taxi drivers. We need the roads."
It was the second bridge leading to Kirkuk bombed this week, local leaders said, and it came on a day when a prominent Sunni tribal leader was found dead south of the city after being kidnapped Friday.
The killing and the bridge bombing reflected rising tensions in the oil-rich area between Kurds and Sunni insurgents who oppose Kurdish plans to make the area part of the north's Kurdish-controlled region.
Also north of Baghdad, gunmen killed two people, including a teacher, near a prison north of Baqouba, in Diyala province, the police said. An Iraqi soldier was also killed and four others were wounded by a roadside bomb in Muqdadiya.
