Baghdad, Iraq ? Tiny plastic sandals, some tattered and stained with blood, lay in a pile near a child’s crushed bicycle. Mothers wailed and beat themselves after a suicide bomber killed 18 children and teenagers getting candy and toys from American soldiers.

One of the soldiers was among the up to 27 people killed in Wednesday’s blast in an impoverished Shiite Muslim neighborhood. At least 70 other people, including three U.S. soldiers, were wounded. A newborn was among those hurt.

Terrified parents who heard the shattering explosion raced from their homes to the discover the worst – children’s mangled, bloodied bodies strewn on the street.

Twelve of the dead were 13 or younger and six were between 14 and 17, said police Lt. Mohammed Jassim Jabr. Among the wounded was 4-day-old Miriam Jabber, cut slightly by flying glass and debris.

“There were some American troops blocking the highway when a U.S. Humvee came near a gathering of children,” said Karim Shukir, 42. The troops began handing out candy and smiley-face key chains.

“Suddenly, a speeding car bomb … struck both the Humvee and the children,” Shukir said.

An elderly woman dressed in black beat her chest in front of her house. Others meandered about in the broiling heat, seeming dazed.

The slaughter of so many Shiite children is likely to raise tensions further between the majority Shiites – who dominate the government – and the minority Sunni Arabs, the foundation of the insurgency.

In Washington, the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, warned that both foreign terrorists and Iraqi insurgents linked to Saddam Hussein’s Baath party were trying to foment civil war.

“The foreign terrorists … see the Iraqi people, including Iraqi children, as cannon fodder to be sacrificed in the pursuit of an extremist agenda of conflict between civilizations,” Khalilzad told reporters. “Hard-line Baathists want a civil war as a vehicle to restore their dictatorship, and – if they cannot win power – to take Iraq down with them.”

The family of a child, whom relatives would only identify as a 9-year-old boy named Ahmed, wail over his coffin during his funeral at their home near the scene of the suicide car bomb attack that killed him in Baghdad, Iraq. A suicide car bomber sped to American soldiers as they distributed candy to children and detonated his vehicle Wednesday, killing up to 27 other people, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

At Kindi hospital, where many victims were taken, a distraught mother swathed in black sat cross-legged outside the operating room. “May God curse the mujahedeen and their leader,” she cried, referring to the insurgents as she pounded her head with her fists in grief.

Early Wednesday, Iraqi security forces stormed several houses across Baghdad, detaining, torturing and killing 11 Sunni Arab men, including a cleric, the Sunni clerical Association of Muslim Scholars said.

The bodies were found later in the day in a Shiite neighborhood, said an association official, Sheik Hassan Sabri Salman. The government’s Sunni Endowments, which cares for Sunni mosques, also reported the deaths.

Sunni groups also accused security forces of allowing at least nine Sunnis detained last weekend to die after locking them for hours in a van without ventilation as temperatures soared to 115 degrees.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry said both allegations are being investigated, and if true, those responsible will be punished.

Also Wednesday, at least three Iraqi soldiers were killed in two shootouts in Baghdad.