Sixteen people, including nine security force members, were killed and 14 wounded on Thursday in a string of attacks in the Iraqi capital's Sunni district of al-Adhamiyah, the interior ministry said.
Assailants set ablaze the bodies of three soldiers in al-Adhamiyah after shooting them dead, the ministry said.
Three homemade bomb attacks on different routes to the scene of the shooting killed 13 more people, including three soldiers and three policemen, and wounded 14, among them seven police and two civil defense members, it said.
Series of attacks
The ministry said the attacks all took place within a 15-minute timeframe.
Also on Thursday, three soldiers were killed and 12 wounded when an insurgent detonated a car bomb near an army base in al-Sharqat, 300 kilometers (190 miles) north of Baghdad in Salaheddin province, a police officer said.
In the western city of Fallujah, 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of Baghdad, two roadside bombs targeting Iraqi army patrols killed two Iraqi soldiers and wounded eight others, police and hospital officials in the city said.
In the northern city of Mosul, a bomb attached to a police vehicle killed one policeman and injured two others, a police official in the city said.
Mosul has remained a hotbed of insurgent activity even as levels of violence have decreased in other areas of Iraq.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned of the dangers of an upsurge in violence as negotiations on forming a new governing coalition drag on, more than four months after the country held a parliamentary election.
More than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, insurgents are increasingly targeting Iraqi security forces, as all but 50,000 U.S. troops prepare to leave the country by the end of August.
As part of a security agreement between the United States and Iraq, all American troops must leave Iraq by the end of 2011.
No explosion of violence
Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview aired Thursday he would bet "everything" that there would be no explosion of sectarian violence when U.S. combat troops leave Iraq next month.
Biden, in an interview recorded Wednesday as he welcomed home one of America's most combat-tested brigades from Baghdad, said he could not "guarantee" anything but believed that serious violence was unlikely.
"I'm willing to bet everything that there will be no such explosion," Biden said in an interview with the NBC "Today" show.
"We'll still have 50,000 battle-tested combat troops in Iraq... going from leading in combat to supporting the Iraqi combat capability.
"I think neither I nor (U.S. commander) General (Ray) Odierno nor the Pentagon nor the people who have been on the ground so many times think that is likely to happen."
Biden has repeatedly called on Iraq's divided factions to unite and form a government following months of tortuous political negotiations.
This week however, Iraq's political crisis deepened, as parliament indefinitely postponed only its second session since March elections, extending the deadlock that has prevented the formation of a new government.
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