More than 30 people have been killed and dozens injured in a series of bomb attacks across Iraq.


There have been several blasts in Baghdad, including one in which 15 people died. At least 15 were killed in a suicide attack in Kut in the south.

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One person was killed by a car bomb in Kirkuk, and there were explosions in Basra, Ramadi and Karbala.

The violence comes ahead of the withdrawal of US combat troops at end of the month.

In Baghdad, a suicide car bomb hit a police station in the north-east of the city, killing 15 people, with 58 injured, most of them police, while a parked car bomb in the centre of the city near the Muthana Airport Highway killed two people and injured seven.

There were three other explosions, in Haifa Street, in Karrada, and in Ahmeriya, injuring 11 people.

In other incidents:

in Kut, south of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber attacked a police station, killing at least 15 people and injured 84
in Kirkuk, a car bomb killed one person and injured eight
in Basra, a car exploded as police towed it from a parking lot, killing one person and injuring eight
in Ramadi, a car exploded as alleged bombers were working on it, while a second car exploded about 1km away, injuring 12 people
in Karbala, a suicide car bomb exploded at police checkpoint at the entrance to police station, injuring 30 people.
No groups have yet claimed they planned the attacks, although the BBC's Hugh Sykes in Baghdad says the attacks are likely to be linked to a branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Violence in Iraq is down from the peak seen during the sectarian conflict in 2006-2007, although the number of civilian deaths rose sharply in July.

Almost daily attacks on Iraqi forces and traffic police in Baghdad and Anbar province, west of the capital, killed more than 85 people in the first three weeks of August.

On Tuesday, the US military said the number of US troops in Iraq had fallen to 49,700, ahead of a 31 August deadline for US combat operations to end.

The remaining US troops will continue in Iraq until the end of 2011 to advise Iraqi forces and protect US interests.

They will be armed, but will only use their weapons in self-defence or at the request of the Iraqi government, and will work on training Iraqi troops and helping with counter-terrorism operations, the US military said.

Iraq's top army officer recently questioned the timing of the pull-out, saying the country's military might not be ready to take control for another decade.

Meanwhile, Iraqi politics has remained deadlocked five months after national elections, with no new government yet in place.

The Pakistani government on Tuesday announced emergency measures aimed at averting major outbreaks of cholera and other epidemic diseases in the country’s flooded areas.

A national steering committee, comprising top health official, was set up to monitor the situation on a regular basis, officials said after a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and attended by local and international health officials.

National Health Volunteers groups, comprising some 12,000 post— graduate medical students, would also be set up, Information Minister Qamaruz Zaman Kaira said.

Waterborne diseases like cholera, diaorrhea and dysentery were already spreading among the millions staying in relief camps or under the open sky. Malnutrition is further weakening their defence systems.

“As human misery continues to mount, we are seriously concerned with the spread of epidemic diseases,” said Mr. Gilani, adding that 2.2 million people were currently receiving medical assistance.

“I can assure the world and my countrymen that together we shall surmount this tremendous challenge with unity, commitment and will to share the sufferings of those who are at risk and are vulnerable,” Mr. Gilani told the meeting.

Among the flood victims are more than 3.5 million children and tens of thousands of pregnant women, many of whom have given birth in the relief camps, without receiving any medical assistance.

Some 500,000 women are expected to give birth to babies in the flood affected areas over the next six months.

According to the United Nations, the number of people displaced by the floods has now risen to 17 million as the floods continue to swamp more villages in the southern province of Sindh before pouring into the Indian Ocean.

The floods that started on July 28 with heavy monsoon rains have submerged thousands of villages, washed away hundreds of kilometres of roads, dozens of bridges and over 1.7 million acres of crops.

The country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, warned on Monday that it would take at least three years for the country to recover.

Economic growth is predicted to slow to below 3 per cent this year, far below pre—flood estimates of 4.25 per cent.

Finance officials were holding talks with the International Monetary Fund to revise the terms of the country’s 10—billion—dollar loan programme.

More than £3,000 has been put into the collection box at Mohammed Asif's Gloucestershire shop. Those proceeds will be spent 4,000 miles away, in the north-western province of Pakistan, where the businessman's extended family has constructed a soup kitchen for hundreds of flood victims.

The aid supply chain linking Asif's Oriental Food Store in Cheltenham to refugees flooding into the Pakistani city of Nushera is one of hundreds of ad-hoc relief efforts that British Pakistanis have begun organising while Pakistan's government struggles to cope with the disaster.

"The support from the Pakistani community to us has been extremely noticeable," said Brendan Paddy of the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation which responds to major disasters overseas. "But there are a significant number organising their own community activity and wiring money to contacts in the country."

The surge in support from British Muslims, who are currently observing the holy month of Ramadan, contrasts with donations to multinational relief charities, which have struggled to raise the sums given after recent disasters elsewhere in the world.

Asif, 36, whose family lived four miles from the swollen Indus river, which is causing some of the most severe flooding, said his relatives had survived. "Their situation is better than some villagers who have lost their entire savings. They're just focusing now on helping the survivors."

He added: "People are coming in off the streets and putting £20 notes in the box. Even kids are giving. People here remember the floods in Cheltenham and Tewkesbury in 2007, so they can relate through that."

When friends returning from Pakistan told Rezwan Farooque, 32, from Crawley that, in contrast to the 2005 earthquake in the country, the floods represented a "creeping disaster" he decided to take action.

His football team, Crawley Tigers, most of whom are of Pakistani origin, opened a car wash outside a local mosque. The £5 fee has helped raise £3,700, he said, money which has been given to the aid charity Islamic Relief. It is the kind of local, small-scale action that appears to be flourishing in Muslim communities across the UK.

In Leicester, one group began selling £5 boxes of curry to office workers. "We're just a one group of friends who wanted to get together and raise money," the organiser, Shah Ali, told the local newspaper, the Leicester Mercury.

"What we're saying is that food for you means food for people in Pakistan. We were amazed by how many orders initially we received so we doubled the target to 2,000 boxes."

Similar initiatives are afoot in Huddersfield, Bradford and Blackburn.

Irim Ali, 31, a Labour councillor from Newcastle upon Tyne, said £15,000 was raised by British Pakistanis at a recent event she organised in the city, with just five days notice and the help of the Asian radio station Spice FM. The proceeds will go to Islamic Relief.

She said: "Muslims give about 2% of their wealth to charities during Ramadan, so the timing has been good. A lot of businessmen and families have relatives who have been affected out there so they are donating large sums of money."

The United Nations made an urgent plea for helicopters as the death toll from weeks of massive flooding in Pakistan neared 1,600 people Wednesday.

"We need at least 40 additional heavy-lift helicopters, working at full capacity, to reach the huge numbers of increasingly desperate people with life-saving relief," Marcus Prior of the World Food Programme said in a statement.

Flood waters have washed away critical roads and bridges throughout the country, but especially in the mountainous areas of Gilgit Baltistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir, and in the Swat Valley of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

"In northern areas that are cut off, markets are short of vital supplies, and prices are rising sharply. People are in need of food staples to survive."

The United Nation's estimates that 800,000 people in need of humanitarian aid across Pakistan are only accessible by air.

Over three weeks, Pakistan's floods have affected more than 17 million people, leaving some 4 million homeless. An estimated six million people are in need of emergency shelter, of which just over 1 million have received tents or plastic tarps.

The death toll from the flooding in Pakistan rose to 1,589 Wednesday, according to the nation's Disaster Authority.

Adding to the misery, the forecast calls for more monsoon rains across upper Pakistan through Thursday.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani met Tuesday with local and national health officials as well as United Nations agencies and other international groups to address the mounting health crisis.

The U.N. says it still needs $200 million more in aid.