BAGHDAD, Aug 1 (AFP) - At least five car bombs exploded in quick succession outside churches in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul, in an apparently targeted assault on Iraq`s influential Christian minority, police said.
At least one person was killed and 22 others wounded as the explosions unleashed chaos on the capital`s streets, hospital officials said.
The first car was detonated by a suicide bomber outside an Armenian church in Baghdad`s upmarket district of Karada, said policeman Haidar Abdul Hussein. Minutes later, a second car bomb exploded next to a Catholic Syriac church.
Thick black smoke billowed in the sky above Karada, clearly visible for miles, as ambulances screamed through the streets and firemen battled to contain the blaze.
Shortly afterwards, a car bomb exploded inside a church and convent in southern Baghdad, causing massive damage and casualties, police said.
Officials at the Ibn al-Nafeez hospital said 15 people had been admitted with injuries following the attacks. One of them later died, said Anas Edward, a doctor.
Six people with multiple burns were treated as the al-Kindi and another two at the capital`s neurosurgical hospital, said officials.
Nervous police officers fired into the air and an AFP correspondent saw the gutted shells of the two cars lying in the streets.
US helicopters circled the scene of the blasts as American soldiers deployed in force around the two besieged churches.
"It`s a crime. Its Sunday, we were at mass. There were a lot of women and children," Bishop Raphael Kutami at the Syriac church.
"There are so many injured and we don`t know how many. We were coming out of the church," when the bomb exploded, said another priest at the same church.
A US military spokesman said "at least four explosions" went off in the central Baghdad area early Sunday evening.
In Mosul, 370 kilometres (230 miles) north of the capital, two car bombs exploded outside a church in the early evening outside the Mar Polis church in the central Mohandessin neighbourhood, said Major Mohammed Omar Taha.
"There are casualties, but we don`t know if anyone was killed," he said.