WAR DEVELOPMENTS

IRAQ

> Bombs exploded at a bus station and a small market in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 15 people and wounding 29 others, and one person died when a roadside bomb targeted a convoy carrying a Shiite government official and former member of the Iraqi Governing Council. Separately, unknown assailants gunned down a police officer in east Baghdad.

> In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide bomber rammed his car into a passing police patrol, injuring four officers, and a roadside bomb killed one person and wounded another. Separately, gunmen shot dead a civilian and a police officer and wounded another in drive-by-shootings, and an Iraqi soldier was injured when his patrol struck a roadside bomb.

> In Madain, south of Baghdad, a mortar shell struck a house, killing a woman and her two young children. Near the city of Tikrit, some 80 miles north of the capital, one civilian died on the scene of a road accident with coalition troops and a second Iraqi died after being rushed to an aid station. Iraqi police said an American Humvee ran over four Iraqis while they were trying to hang a banner in the middle of a road, killing two and wounding two others.

AFGHANISTAN

> Gen. David Petraeus, the new chief of U.S. Central Command, arrived Tuesday for a firsthand look at the war in Afghanistan, where U.S. deaths are at an all-time high and attacks against Westerners are on the rise.

> A military report released Tuesday said a deadly attack on a U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan in July that killed nine American troops was executed with the support of some local police and government leaders as well as villagers. The report recommended the district’s Afghan police chief and governor be replaced, if not arrested and tried for committing crimes against the government.

> A U.S. civilian shot an Afghan civilian in Kandahar province after the Afghan allegedly set another U.S. civilian on fire. The military did not identify the Americans or who they were working for.

PAKISTAN

> Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani warned that the next U.S. president must halt attacks on militants in his country or risk losing the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban. “No matter who the president of America will be, if he doesn’t respect the sovereignty and integrity of Pakistan … anti-America sentiments and anti-West sentiment will be there,” Gilani said. He also urged the U.S. to share intelligence with his country’s military to allow Pakistanis to go after the militants themselves.

> Thousands of hard-line Muslims demonstrated Tuesday against U.S. missile strikes in a town in the border region near Afghanistan and the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, burning U.S. flags and chanting, “Stop killing innocent people, stop messing with our country.” U.S.-led troops on Tuesday killed five insurgents in the southern Helmand province, after the militants ambushed their patrol, the coalition said in a statement.