Iraqi security personnel look at damaged vehicles at the site of a bomb attack in Kerbala, 110km south of Baghdad.
HILLA: Attacks across Iraq, including more than a dozen car bombs, killed at least 46 people yesterday while the head of Baghdad’s provincial council escaped an assassination attempt on his convoy.
The violence was the latest in months of unrelenting bloodshed, the country’s worst since 2008, that has sparked concern Iraq is slipping back into the all-out sectarian war of previous years that killed tens of thousands.
Authorities have imposed tough restrictions on movement in the capital and elsewhere, and carried out wide-ranging operations against militants, but insurgents have pressed their attacks.
Yesterday, they struck in more than a dozen towns and cities, with at least 17 car bombs, killing 46 people and wounding more than 130 overall.
The deadliest violence was in and around the city of Hilla, the predominantly Shia capital of Babil province south of Baghdad, where four car bombs killed 19 people, police and medics said.
“I saw many people with burns, and people who were on fire, they were screaming for help,” said Sajjad Al Amari, a 22-year-old witness to one car bombing on the outskirts of Hilla.
Another witness, Karrar Ahmed, said he saw “many shop owners who were thrown to the floor, many were killed and wounded, and they were lying on the ground, among the goods from their shops”.
Ahmed said incompetence on the part of the security forces had “cleared the way for terrorists to target, and kill, civilians”.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the violence, which largely struck majority Shia areas. Sunni militants linked to Al Qaeda, however, often target Iraq’s Shia majority, whose adherents they regard as apostates.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, a car bomb hit the convoy of Riyadh Al Adhadh, chief of the provincial council and a Sunni lawmaker from the party of the national parliament speaker.
Adhadh was unharmed but two others, including one of his bodyguards, were killed and four people were wounded.
The blast shattered the windows of nearby shops and buildings, and security forces imposed a cordon around the area in the aftermath, a journalist at the scene said.
A car bomb killed three others later in the day in the capital.
Another car bombing at a market on the outskirts of the southern port city of Basra killed three people and wounded 15 others, officials said.
Attacks south of Baghdad — in Yusifiyah, Karbala, Nasiriyah, Kut, Suweirah and Hafriyah — left nine people dead, while shootings and bombings in and around the northern and western cities of Abu Ghraib, Baquba, Sharqat, Kirkuk and Mosul killed 10 more.
The latest bloodshed comes amid a months-long increase in violence which has left more than 4,000 dead already this year.
Authorities insist a campaign targeting militants is yielding results, claiming to have captured hundreds of alleged fighters and killed dozens, with security forces apparently having dismantled several insurgent training camps and bomb-making sites.
But the government has faced criticism for not doing more to defuse Sunni Arab anger over alleged ill-treatment at the hands of the Shia-led authorities.
AFP
