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Attacks Could Be Backlash After Iraq Touted Series Of Blows Against al Qaeda.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A series of bombs targeting Shi’ite areas rocked Baghdad Friday, killing at least 56 people in an apparent backlash after Iraq touted a series of blows against a weakened al Qaeda-led insurgency.

Eight people were also killed by bombs in the Sunni west of the country, less than a week after Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. troops killed al Qaeda’s top two leaders in Iraq.

Thirteen blasts hit different areas of the Iraqi capital around the time of Muslim prayers, mostly near Shi’ite mosques and at a marketplace, an Interior Ministry source said.

Three bombs targeted worshippers outside the main office of fiery anti-American Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the crowded Sadr City slum. Those blasts killed 39 people and wounded 56, generating denunciations of the security forces. Some youths threw stones at an Iraqi army vehicle.

“Why do they always target us? We are peaceful people. We come to pray and then go on our way,” one survivor told Reuters Television in an angry tirade, without identifying himself.

The attacks, one of Iraq’s deadliest in recent weeks, also wounded around 120 people and signaled the possibility of a rise in violence after a March national election produced no clear winner and left a power vacuum for insurgents to exploit.

“Targeting prayers in areas with a certain majority,” Baghdad security spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said, referring to Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim majority, “is a revenge for the losses suffered by al Qaeda.

“We expect such terrorist acts to continue.”

Last Sunday, al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the purported head of its affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq, were killed in a raid in a rural area northwest of Baghdad by Iraqi and U.S. forces.

The strike against al Qaeda’s Iraq leadership has been accompanied by a string of smaller battlefield victories in which more than 300 suspected al Qaeda operatives have been arrested and 19 killed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

By Muhanad Mohammed

Men carry a victim injured in one of a series of parked car bombs in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, April 23, 2010. Triple bombings hit a Sadrist office Friday as worshippers were finishing their prayers, killing 14 and wounding an estimated 75 in a rash of attacks on Shiites across Iraq's capital.Explosions outside three other Shiite mosques in Baghdad, all timed around the end of Friday's prayers, appeared to be the work of insurgents looking anew to inflame sectarian tensions.