Baghdad:
Two car bombs in Baghdad's densely populated eastern district of Sadr city killed 15 people on Thursday, medical and police sources said, hours after a bombing on the edge of the capital's central Green Zone killed two others.
The car bombs went off within 20 minutes of each other on Thursday evening, the sources said. A total of 51 people were also wounded.
Earlier a bomb killed two people near the Green Zone district which houses most government buildings, security and medical sources said.
The bomb struck 200 metres from the edge of zone, they said. In response, security forces closed two nearby bridges that span the Tigris River, linking eastern and western Baghdad.
Bombings are frequent in the Iraqi capital, but mostly strike neighbourhoods some distance from the central district which houses the Iraqi parliament and the U.S. Embassy and is a base for many Iraqi politicians.
Sunni militants from Islamic State, which controls much of the north and west of Iraq, regularly target Shi'ite neighbourhoods of Baghdad with car bombs.
© Thomson Reuters 2014