BAGHDAD: Bombs exploded across the Iraqi capital yesterday, killing at least 38 people, police said, as suspected Sunni militants pursued a campaign to provoke intercommunal conflict.
Eight of the 10 blasts in Baghdad were in mainly Shia districts, but there was also an explosion in a mixed area and another in the predominantly Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of Doura. In the deadliest attack, a parked car blew up in a commercial street in Husseiniya, killing five people.
Separately, four members of a government-backed Sunni militia were killed in a roadside bombing in northern Baghdad earlier yesterday, and six people including a police officer died in fighting between militants and special forces in Hilla, 100km south of the capital. A surge of violence has killed more than 6,000 people across Iraq this year, reversing a decline in sectarian bloodshed that reached a climax in 2006-07.
At that time, Sunni tribesmen banded together and found common cause with US troops to rout Al Qaeda, forcing it underground.
The civil war in Syria has put acute pressure on Iraq’s delicate sectarian balance, which was already under strain from power struggle between Sunnis, Shias and ethnic Kurds, who run their own affairs in the north.
The Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed responsibility on Sunday for a rare bomb attack in the usually peaceful Kurdistan region last month.
At least six people were killed when militants tried to storm the headquarters of the security services in the Kurdish capital Arbil on September 29, the first big attack there since 2007.
Reuters
