A car bomb in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk killed 15 on Thursday, a health official was quoted by AFP as saying.

The car bomb ripped through a crowded street in a mainly Kurdish neighborhood of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

"It's a busy street with restaurants and shops, there is great destruction," a police colonel said. The explosion rocked the predominantly Kurdish northern neighborhood of Shorjah.

Both he and the head of the health directorate for Kirkuk province, Sabah Mohammed Amin, said the blast killed at least 15 people and wounded 20.

Earlier today, two car bombs in Baghdad's densely populated eastern district of Sadr city also killed 15 people and wounded 47 people, AFP reported police and medical sources saying, hours after a bombing on the edge of the capital's central Green Zone killed two others.

The car bombs went off within 20 minutes of each other on Thursday evening, the sources said. A total of 51 people were also wounded.

The Green Zone district houses most government buildings.
The bomb struck 200 meters from the edge of zone, sources said. In response, security forces closed two nearby bridges that span the Tigris River, linking eastern and western Baghdad.

Bombings are frequent in the Iraqi capital, but mostly strike neighborhoods some distance from the central district which houses the Iraqi parliament and the U.S. Embassy and is a base for many Iraqi politicians.

Sunni militants from Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which controls much of the north and west of Iraq, regularly target Shi'ite neighborhoods of Baghdad with car bombs.

[With AFP and Reuters]