BAGHDAD: Bombings in and around Baghdad yesterday, including blasts near two markets, killed seven people, the latest in a year-long surge in violence that authorities have failed to quell.
The bloodshed, at its highest level since 2008, came a day after a suicide car bomb went off in the middle of a wedding party convoy in the western town of Rawa, killing 15 people, including women and children.
The unrest, which comes barely six weeks before parliamentary elections, is driven principally by widespread discontent among Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority and by the civil war in neighbouring Syria.
A car bomb at a market in Baghdad’s predominantly Shia neighbourhood of Shuala killed three people, while another blast near a market in Rashid left one dead, security and medical officials said.
Bombings in Taji and Tarmiyah, just north of the capital, killed three others, including two soldiers. On Thursday evening, a suicide car bomb that went off in the middle of a wedding party convoy killed 15 people and wounded 17 others in the town of Rawa, in the Sunni desert province of Anbar.
Anbar has been roiled in recent months by unrest that has seen anti-government fighters take control of Fallujah, a city on Baghdad’s doorstep, as well as shifting areas of provincial capital Ramadi.
Violence in Iraq has reached a level not seen since 2008, when the country was just emerging from a brutal period of sectarian bloodshed in which tens of thousands of people died. More than 200 people have been killed so far this month and upwards of 1,900 since the beginning of the year, according to figures based on security and medical sources.
Algerian troops kill 7 militants
ALGIERS: Algerian troops have killed seven armed militants who crossed the border from neighbouring Tunisia, the state news agency APS reported yesterday. There has been less militant violence in Algeria since the North African country ended its 1990s war with Islamists that killed 200,000 people. But chaos in neighbouring Libya has allowed militants to strengthen their presence in the Maghreb.
APS said the militants had crossed the border in a vehicle and had tried to flee to the Boudjelal mountain area, but there were surrounded and killed by Algerian troops near Tebessa, around 480km east of Algiers. Islamist militants have used the Chambi mountains across the border in Tunisia as a refuge in the past.
The risk from Islamist violence in Algeria was highlighted by the assault on the Amenas gas plant near the desert border with Libya just over a year ago. Forty oil workers were killed in the attack, all but one of them foreigners.
Tunisia is also battling militants from the hardline group Ansar al-Sharia, one of the Islamist movements to emerge since the country’s 2011 uprising. The group was this year listed as a foreign terrorist organisation by Washington. Turmoil and a weak military in Libya have allowed militants linked to al Qaeda to gain a foothold in the remote deserts there, some after fleeing from the French military intervention in Mali launched at the start of last year.Agencies
