Two car bombs struck a Shiite district in Baghdad on Monday, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens, officials said, as sectarian tensions rose following a rampage by Shiite gunmen killed 41 people, most of them Sunnis.

The violence began when a car parked near a repair shop on the edge of the Shiite slum of Sadr City blew up, followed within minutes by a suicide car bomber who drove into the crowd that had gathered near the site.

Hospital officials said at least eight people were killed and 41 wounded in the blast. AP Television News footage showed the devastated repair shop with a crumpled roof and the blackened hulks of cars on the street outside.

A roadside bomb also struck a police patrol near a restaurant elsewhere in eastern Baghdad, wounding three policemen, police Lt. Ahmed Qassim said.

And a bomb exploded in the Shurja market in central Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 18, police Col. Adnan al-Obeidi said.

In Kirkuk, a suicide truck bomb struck an office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the main Kurdish political parties in Iraq, killing five people and wounding 12 others, police Brig. Sarhat Qadir said.

A police patrol in the predominantly Shiite city of Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, also hit a roadside bomb, leaving one policeman dead and four wounded, army Capt. Hassim al-Khafaji said.

'A dangerous precipice'

The streets in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad were calm on Monday after the deadly rampage the day before by Shiite gunmen, who dragged Sunnis from their cars, picked them out on the street and killed them.

Police said 41 people were killed, although there were conflicting figures. An official in the prime minister's office, Haidar Majid, said only nine people died in Jihad, while police Lt. Mohammed Khayoun insisted the figure of 41 was correct, with 24 bodies taken to Yarmouk hospital and 17 to the city morgue.

Some Sunni clerics put the death toll at more than 50 in Jihad, a once prosperous neighborhood of handsome villas owned by officials of Saddam Hussein's security services.

Sunni leaders expressed outrage over the killings, and President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, appealed for calm, warning that the nation stood "in front of a dangerous precipice."

We occasionally are able to pop in with great success, like Zarqawi or 12 million people voting. But increasing electricity in Baghdad is not the kind of thing that tends to get on the news, or small business formation is not the kind of thing to get -- or new schools or new hospitals, the infrastructure being rebuilt that had been torn apart. And I'm not being critical. I'm just giving you a fact of something I have to deal with in order to make it clear to the American people that the sacrifice of those families is worth it. We are winning. And a free Iraq is an essential part of changing the conditions which causes the terrorists to be able to recruit killers in the first place.

FP: The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad recently sent a cable to Washington detailing the dangerous situation under which its Iraqi employees work. Is the situation in the Green Zone as bad as the cable made it out to be?

RN: Yes, it is that bad. [The cable] didn’t come as a surprise to me, except that somebody in the embassy was courageous enough to outline the hardships in very frank detail, and the ambassador was honest enough to put his name to it. It is exactly what our own Iraqi staff has gone through for years now. As early as 2003, the Iraqis who work for us were not telling their family or friends that they worked for Americans. At the time, we thought it was a ridiculous precaution—a throwback to the Saddam era—but as time went on, they proved that they knew their society a lot better than we did.

FP: Where do you get information about the insurgency?

RN: There was a stage in the war when we could talk to insurgents and people representing insurgents. Now, it’s just too dangerous. There is no way to safely contact them. We talk to Sunni leaders who are in touch with at least the Iraqi insurgents, the distinction being that al Qaeda insurgents are mainly foreign terrorists. [Iraqi] groups have a political constituency among Sunni politicians and they are in touch. So we can and do talk to them frequently. In fact, so does the U.S. Embassy.

FP: Are journalists and the military seeing two different pictures in Iraq?

RN: Sometimes it’s hard to say. Many in the military are here on their second or third tour and they don’t want to feel that this is all a doomed enterprise. I’m not saying it is, but to some extent they are victims of their own propaganda. Two reasonable people can look at the same set of information and come to different conclusions. A good example: I traveled recently to Taji for the handover of a large swath of territory north of Baghdad to the Iraqi Army’s 9th Armored Division. This was meant to be a big milestone: an important chunk of territory that has lots of insurgent activity, given over completely to the control of the Iraqi Army. But when we spoke to the Iraqi Army officers, they said they didn’t have enough equipment. They are still completely dependent on the U.S. Army for their logistics, their meals, and a lot of their communications. The United States turned territory over to them, but they are not a functioning, independent army unit yet.

American and allied troops are engaged in their biggest operation against Taliban forces in Afghanistan since they drove the fundamentalist movement from power in 2001. These photographs were taken over two weeks in June with Charlie Company, Fourth Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, near Hazarbuz, in Zabul Province.

The Americans face the hard job of trying to tell local farmers from Taliban insurgents, who have gained strength across southern Afghanistan. The Americans set up a base, then probed into villages. They were soon ambushed. The Taliban can easily persuade or coerce villagers to assist them. They arm the villagers or equip them with radios. Almost any man is suspect. During one raid, which was typical, the Americans separated the men. Homes were searched, and the men were marched to the base for questioning.

The Americans feel the hands of those who claim to be farmers, to make sure they are rough. They check under the men's shirts for calluses from carrying rifle clips, or for bruises from firing rocket-propelled grenades. As often is the case, almost all are released for lack of evidence.

Col. Tom Collins, the American military spokesman in Kabul, said, "We have intelligence that leads us to a certain village where there are antigovernment elements and we take in those we find, screen them, and some are then let go immediately, but they still have to be questioned."

The day after the raid, the Americans were ambushed again, this time at their base. Automatic rifle fire sprayed just inches above a row of soldiers as they lay resting.

On the final day of the operation, a raid on a village sent several men fleeing for the mountains. They were met by American Ranger Scouts. Three men were captured. They confessed to being Taliban fighters and were brought back to the base to be handed over to the Afghan authorities.