Iraqis stand at the site of a car bomb attack near a restaurant in Talbiya district, eastern Baghdad, yesterday.
BAGHDAD: Attacks around Baghdad and north Iraq left 35 people dead yesterday, including 18 members of a Shia family killed by militants, the latest in a nationwide surge of violence.
The unrest came a day after a wave of bombings targeting Shiites in Baghdad and shootings and bombings elsewhere killed 61 people, further raising fears Iraq is slipping back into the all-out sectarian bloodshed that left tens of thousands dead in 2006 and 2007.
Yesterday’s violence struck towns on the outskirts of Baghdad as well as predominantly Sunni cities in the north of the country, with the deadliest attack hitting south of the capital.
Shortly after midnight, militants bombed adjacent houses belonging to Shia brothers in the town of Latifiyah, which lies about 40km south of Baghdad. A total of 18 people were killed, including five women and six children, and a dozen others were wounded, according to an army officer and a doctor at a nearby hospital.
Latifiyah lies within a confessionally-mixed region known as the “Triangle of Death”, so named for the brutal violence that plagued the area during the peak of Iraq’s sectarian war in 2006-2007. Last week, another attack on a Shia family in the same town killed at least five people.
No group claimed responsibility for the latest violence. Separate attacks in Besmaya, Iskandiriyah and Tarmiyah, also on Baghdad’s outskirts, killed nine people, including seven soldiers.
A shooting and bombings in three Sunni-majority cities north of the capital killed eight people, including five policemen who died in a suicide car bombing against a police station in Mosul.
The latest bloodshed came as Baghdad was still reeling from a wave of car bombs targeting Shia neighbourhoods on Tuesday evening that killed 50 people, while unrest elsewhere left 11 others dead.
Workers were still picking up the pieces from the previous evening’s violence yesterday. At one restaurant, where windows were completely shattered by the blast, three men were consoling each other as they tried to clean up the aftermath of the attack.
“Please, we have cried enough,” one of them told another, before himself breaking into tears, while one man held up the clothes of a friend who died in the attack and shouted, “These are his clothes—what should I do with them?”
Also yesterday, a spokesman for the Counter Terrorism Service announced the arrest of HusseinAl Khazraji, who security forces say is a top aide to Izzat Al Duri, Saddam’s vice president.
Saddam’s Baath party has said Duri, the king of clubs in the US deck of cards showing the most-wanted members of the ousted president’s regime, died in 2005.
But audio messages have been attributed to him in recent years and he is accused of orchestrating violent attacks.
AFP
