BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Mortar attacks and bombings killed at least 46 people and wounded 255 others Thursday across the Iraqi capital in the latest wave of apparent sectarian violence, police officials said.
In Shiite neighborhoods of southeastern Baghdad, 44 people died and at least 160 were injured Thursday in five attacks using mortar rounds and explosions.
Also in the southeastern neighborhood of Mashtal, a car bomb killed two people and wounded 13 others near a gas station, police said.
In other blasts Thursday, three people were wounded when a bomb exploded near a restaurant on eastern Baghdad's Palestine Street, police said.
Another car bomb exploded near a police patrol in the central Baghdad neighborhood of Harthiya, wounding at least four people, including two police officers.
Thursday's violence came after insurgents launched a string of bombings Wednesday in Baghdad and the nearby provinces of Diyala and Babil, killing at least 47 people and wounding more than 100 others, emergency officials said.
Iraqi and U.S. security forces are pressing ahead with an extensive security crackdown in the capital called Operation Together Forward.
More than 250 Iraqis and 15 U.S. soldiers have been killed since Sunday. Sixty-one American soldiers have died in August.
Since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, there have been 2,631 U.S. military fatalities. Seven American civilian contractors of the military also have died in the conflict.
President Bush on Thursday again asserted the battle for Iraq is the "central front in our fight against terrorism."
In a speech before the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, Bush likened the effort to World War II and the Cold War and warned that failure to persevere will lead terrorists to take their battle to U.S. shores. (
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"As veterans, you have seen this kind of enemy before. They are successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century," he said in the first of a series of new speeches on the fight against terrorism.
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