Attacks kill at least 26 across Iraq

BAGHDAD - A new wave of attacks across Iraq, including an assault on a TV station, killed at least 26 people Monday, officials said, as the government pressed on with its offensive to hunt down al-Qaeda-linked militants in the country's volatile western desert.

Five attackers stormed the offices of the channel owned by the provincial government of Salaheddin in the city of Tikrit north of Baghdad, one blowing up a suicide car bomb at the gate and two more setting off explosive suicide belts inside, police said. The others were killed by security forces.

Six channel staffers died, and six others were wounded, police and health officials said. A security source said one of the dead was a female presenter.

Also Monday, militants fired mortar rounds into a military base near Baghdad's western suburb of Abu Ghraib, killing three officers and three soldiers, a police officer said. Seven soldiers were wounded in that attack.

Hours later, a bomb went off next to a passing military patrol in the same area, killing two, an officer and a soldier, he added. Two other soldiers were wounded.

In Baghdad's southern district of Dora, gunmen broke into a pet shop and killed four men, another police officer said.

Three civilians were killed and nine were wounded when a bomb ripped through an outdoor market in the Iraqi capital's northwestern Tobchi district. And on a highway in eastern Baghdad, drive-by shooters opened fire at a bus, killing two commuters and wounding nine.

Separately, gunmen attacked a bus in the town of Baqouba, a former al-Qaeda stronghold about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing three commuters and wounding six, police said.