BAQUBA: A market bombing north of Baghdad was the deadliest in violence that killed 48 people yesterday, as the year’s death toll topped 5,800 amid a surge in unrest.
Yesterday’s attacks came a day after a spate of violence, mostly car bombs targeting Shia districts of Baghdad, killed 59 people and wounded more than 100 in the highest death toll of the month.
Shootings and bombings struck in and around Baghdad and in north Iraq yesterday.
In the deadliest incident, a car bomb exploded at around noon (0900 GMT) in a fruit and vegetable market in the town of Saadiyah, part of the restive ethnically mixed province of Diyala which has seen some of the worst bloodshed.
At least 32 people were killed and 40 wounded in the blast, officials said.
Saadiyah is populated mostly by Faylis, or Shia Kurds, and is in territory Kurdish leaders want to incorporate in their autonomous region in the north over the objections of the central government.
Militants frequently exploit poor communication between Kurdish and central government security forces to launch their attacks.
Shootings and bombings elsewhere in Diyala, as well as in and around Baghdad and the main northern city of Mosul, left 14 others dead while security forces killed two militants.
Authorities in Diyala also found the bodies of a dozen residents snatched by kidnappers purporting to be in the security forces.
The 12 were executed and their bodies thrown into a river, reminiscent of targeted killings that were rampant during the worst of Iraq’s sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007.
No group has claimed responsibility for the violence, but Sunni militants linked to Al Qaeda often carry out such attacks, ostensibly to undermine confidence in the Shiite-led government and security forces.
“Their capability to conduct attacks has increased,” Deputy National Security Adviser Safa Hussein said in a recent interview, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an Al Qaeda front group.
“By now they understand they can’t realise their ambition in establishing a state. Nor can they defeat the government.
“But they can work towards their goal in establishing indirect control in some of the areas, and making the state a failed state, which is a very good environment for them to flourish.”
Investigators searching for the gunmen behind the assassination of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s chief bodyguard, meanwhile, got into a firefight with one of the suspected killers in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.
The suspect and a policeman were both killed in the exchange, security officials said.
AFP
