TWO suicide car bombers killed at least 15 people when they blew themselves up almost simultaneously in a crowded Baghdad street yesterday. The attacks were aimed at a police convoy but those who died were mostly civilians, some of them children.

The blasts, which followed similar strikes on US convoys the day before, appeared to mark the end of a post-election lull in Iraq’s ceaseless violence and a regrouping of militants thrown into confusion by the successful January polls.

The return of the insurgency also placed extra pressure on the victors of those elections, the Shia and Kurdish blocks, who have bickered for ten weeks about which groups will hold which key ministries. Shia officials said that Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the new Prime Minister, was expected to announce a cabinet on Sunday, but the slowness of the political process is widely believed to have emboldened the resistance.

The recent string of attacks has been claimed by the al- Qaeda group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose followers described yesterday’s target as “apostate” police officers riding in convoy. The group has killed hundreds of Iraqis in an 18-month terrorist campaign. While there is believed to be some collaboration between its members and Iraq’s indigenous Islamic militants, most Iraqis are horrified by the carnage. “Is this jihad?” one furious shopkeeper shouted as he surveyed the dead and dying being conveyed to hospital from Jadriyah, an affluent neighbourhood near Baghdad University. “How can we wage jihad against our own police force and people?” US troops detonated a device found at the scene of the double bombing.

The road was particularly crowded because all the nearby streets had been sealed off with huge concrete blast walls to protect Iraqi government offices, the Australian Embassy, political parties and hotels with foreigners living in them, all of which have been rocked by explosions in recent months.

Abbas Khudier, a policeman riding in the nine-car convoy, was close to the centre of destruction. “We were cutting through the traffic when a car in the middle of the street blew up,” he said. “We crossed over to the other side and another car followed. It tried to cross the street but flipped over and then blew up.”

The violence was not confined to the capital. In Kirkuk, where nine Iraqi police officers were blown up the day before, guerrillas sprayed a police station with rifle fire in a drive-by attack, killing five policemen and one civilian.

In Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tirkit, four Iraqis were killed by a car bomb that exploded near a US army base, and in Latifya, to the south of Baghdad, gunment killed the mayor. Two US soldiers were wounded by a roadside bomb that hit their convoy in Baqouba, northeast of the capital.

In Mahawil, a town near Latifiya, another bomber killed four Iraqi policemen and wounded six bystanders when he blew himself up in a market.

In al-Qaim, a remote city on the border with Syria where guerrillas frequently cross into Iraq, residents said that many families had started fleeing their homes after the Iraqi security forces had fallen apart and that American snipers had taken up positions on high buildings.

Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, backed by guerrilla fighters, launched an intense attack on a US base there this week, one of an increasing number of brazen strikes on American facilities.

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