Three car bombs in a northern Iraqi city killed two people and wounded about 20 on Wednesday, a police official said.

The blasts struck late in the morning in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk that sits on a fault line of ethnic tensions among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen.

Police Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir said the bombs hit outside a Kurdish police headquarters, a highway and a gas station in southern Kirkuk, 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad.

Earlier, two minor bombings that appeared to target police wounded six people in the Iraqi capital.

The first blast wounded four outside the Al-Ansar mosque in the Shia neighborhood of Sadr City as a police patrol passed by. A few minutes later, the second bomb exploded on the nearby Mohammed Al-Qasim highway. Officials said two policemen who were on patrol were hurt.

The police officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information about the Baghdad blasts.

Violence across Iraq has dropped dramatically from just a few years ago, but bombings and shootings still occur almost every day.