BAGHDAD – Bomb attacks and shootings killed at least 75 people in Iraq on Wednesday, Jan. 15, police and hospital sources said, making it one of the bloodiest days in months.

In the deadliest incident, a bomb blew up in a funeral tent where mourners were marking the death two days ago of a Sunni Muslim pro-government militiaman, police said. It killed 18 people and wounded 16 in Shatub, a village south of Baquba.

In northwestern Iraq, assailants detonated roadside bombs near a bridge in Ain al-Jahash, 60 km (37 miles) south of Mosul as an army patrol was crossing it. Six soldiers were killed and eight people were wounded, six of them civilians, police said.

Gunmen killed seven truck drivers, kidnapped two and set three trucks ablaze in the mainly Shi’ite district of Maamil in Baghdad’s eastern outskirts, police said.

Two years after U.S. troops left Iraq, violence has climbed back to its highest levels since the sectarian bloodshed of 2006-2007, when tens of thousands of people were killed.

The army is locked in a standoff with Sunni militants who overran Falluja, a city west of Baghdad, more than two weeks ago in a challenge to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government.

They are led by the al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which is fighting in western Iraq and Syria to carve out a cross-border Islamist fiefdom.