At least 76 people were killed and more than 150 wounded in Baghdad by a bomb detonated in a busy marketplace Wednesday night. The bombing, just six days before U.S. security forces are set to pull back from Iraq’s cities and towns, was the third such incident to inflict double-digit civilian casualties in the last two weeks.

The New York Times:

A bomb attached to a motorcycle exploded in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, killing at least 76 people and injuring 156 in a market as it was filled with shoppers, hospital officials said Thursday.

The bombing Wednesday evening was at least the third in two weeks to cause double-digit casualties in Shiite communities. On Saturday, a truck bomb in Taza, a Shiite Turkmen area in northern Iraq, killed at least 68 people. On June 10, a car bomb exploded outside Nasiriya, the capital of a predominantly Shiite province in southern Iraq where bombs are rare, killing at least 28 people and inciting a near riot among survivors who threw stones at the police, blaming them for lax security.

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