Employing a range of weapons, including a motorcycle suicide bomb and several car bombs, insurgents carried out attacks across a broad swath of central and northern Iraq today that killed at least 33 people and injured scores of others.The strikes continued a series of bloody assaults begun last Sunday that appear to be the militants’ response to the start of an ambitious offensive led by the Iraqi government, in which tens of thousands of Iraqi security officials have been assigned to police the streets of Baghdad. Much of the violence earlier in the week unfolded in Baghdad, but today many of the deadly attacks today took place outside the capital, as the insurgency, largely led by recalcitrant Sunni Arabs, sought to apply pressure on a number of fronts. The insurgents may have deliberately chosen targets outside of the capital during the Iraqi-led offensive to show their ability to adapt to the strategies of Iraqi government, and to demonstrate that the guerilla war is being waged on as large a scale now as it ever has been.Full Story