One blast, from a parked car, struck al-Zahraa Square, an intersection a half-mile from the large Kazimiyah shrine, said a police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
The second explosion, also from an unoccupied vehicle, occurred at the Aden intersection, at the western entrance to the Kazimiyah neighborhood.
The long-running series of bombings aimed at
Iraq's majority Shiite population has been blamed on Sunni extremists seeking to inflame animosities between the two sects.
In southern Iraq late Tuesday, three gunmen in a speeding automobile fatally shot a junior aide to the country's pre-eminent Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, police and a source in the ayatollah's office reported Wednesday.
Sheik Raheem al-Hasnawi, al-Sistani's representative in the al-Mishkhab area, 20 miles south of the southern Shiite shrine city of Najaf, was killed around 11 p.m. Tuesday near his home on the north side of Najaf, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.
Further details were not immediately available. Both intra-Shiite violence and attacks by Sunni extremists have claimed the lives of Shiite figures in Iraq's sectarian-political turmoil.
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