Baghdad - Bombs exploded at a bus station and a small market in Baghdad, killing 15 people Tuesday in an increase in bloodshed in the Iraqi capital after a week of relative calm, police and hospital officials said.

Victim is assisted Tuesday after being wounded in a bomb explosion in Baghdad. (Photo: Karim Kadim / AP)

    U.S. officials say attacks in Baghdad average about four a day - down nearly 90 percent from levels of late 2006, when Shiite-Sunni fighting was at its high point and just before the U.S. troop surge that helped bring down violence in the capital.

    Tuesday's blasts came a day after a series of bombings killed 10 people and wounded 40 more, underscoring the threat still posed by extremists.

    Other attacks also took place in Mosul, where violence has spiked in recent months.

    In Baghdad, a bomb hidden under a car blew up at a bus depot in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Mashtal on the east side, killing 11 people, including two women. Twenty-one were wounded in the attack, authorities said.

    In the northern Shiite-dominated district of Qahira, four people were killed and eight injured when a roadside bomb exploded near a market, police said.

    Also Tuesday, one person died when a roadside bomb in central Baghdad targeted the convoy of a Shiite government official and former member of the Iraqi Governing Council.

    Ahmed Shiyaa al-Barak, who currently serves as the head of a government real estate commission, escaped without injury. Five of his guards and four bystanders were injured, police said.

    Assailants also gunned down a policeman in east Baghdad.

    Meanwhile, in the northern city of Mosul, a suicide bomber rammed his car into a passing police patrol, injuring four officers, police said.

    A roadside bomb killed one person and wounded another, while gunmen shot dead a civilian and a policeman in separate drive-by-shootings, officials said.

    Also, an Iraqi soldier was injured when his patrol struck a roadside bomb, and a gunman wounded a policeman in a separate incident.

    Elsewhere, a mortar shell struck a house in Madain, south of Baghdad, killing a woman and her two young children, police said.

    Near the city of Tikrit, some 80 miles north of the capital, one civilian died in a road accident with coalition troops, the U.S. military said. A second Iraqi died after being rushed to an aid station.

    Iraqi police said an American Humvee ran over four Iraqis while they were trying to hang a banner in the middle of a road, killing two.

    The Iraqi officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information to the media.

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