Baghdad, Iraq ? Car bombers targeted Iraq’s security services Thursday, blasting Iraqis hoping to join the military in Baghdad and a civil defense post north of the capital, killing 41 people and wounding nearly 150.

Most of the victims were poor Iraqis desperate to take dangerous jobs in the Iraqi security forces because of a lack of alternatives in a country with up to 45 percent unemployment. They took their chances at the recruitment center in Baghdad even though a car bombing killed 47 people there in February.

“I have been coming for three weeks and they decided to interview us today,” Abdul Wahid Shadhan, 32, said as he lay in a hospital bed coughing up blood. “I heard a big explosion, I lost sight of everything and then I found myself in the hospital.”

Shadhan said he had been out of work since the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army last year. “I was obliged to work as a porter to feed my seven children,” he told The Associated Press.

Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem al-Shalan promised a “house-to-house” search for anybody involved in planning the suicide attack.

“We will cut off the hands of those people, we will slit their throats if it is necessary to do so,” he told reporters. “For those people who want to join the new Iraqi army, we will protect them, and we will find them a safe location so they can submit their applications.”

Thursday’s attack near the recruitment center — the deadliest single blast since a car bombing at the same base in February — came amid a surge of violence targeting American troops and their Iraqi allies ahead of the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.

The attacks are apparently designed to shake confidence in Iraqi security forces, seen by some in the region as beholden to the Americans.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, here for talks with the Iraqi leadership, promised that American troops would support the new government after the handover because “Iraqi security forces are not ready to assume their job.”

The mother of Abdul Razak Abdullah, 32, cries and reaches out to hug him outside a Baghdad, Iraq, hospital after she discovered he was not killed in a car bomb blast. A car slammed into a crowd of volunteers Thursday outside a civil defense recruiting center in Baghdad and exploded, killing at least 35 people and wounding at least 145, Iraqi officials said.

In the Baghdad attack, a white sport-utility vehicle packed with artillery shells exploded near a gate of a sprawling Iraqi security compound. The base is close to the Muthanna airport on the western side of the Tigris River.

The explosion scattered bodies, blood and debris across a four-lane highway outside the base, shared by the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and the U.S. military. No American troops were hurt.

Col. Mike Murray said 175 recruits inside the walled compound also escaped injury but many of the victims had just gotten off a bus about 9 a.m.

At least 35 people died and 145 were wounded at the Baghdad site, and the toll was likely to increase, health ministry official Saad al-Amili said.