Attacks in Iraq killed at least 12 people and wounded dozens more on Friday, security and medical officials said, in the latest wave of violence sweeping across the country.
A roadside bomb exploded in the morning in the main market in Al-Husseiniyah, a Shia-majority area on Baghdad’s northeast outskirts, and another went off after emergency personnel arrived, an interior ministry official said.
A medical source at the Sheikh al-Dhari hospital said the facility had received eight bodies and more than 50 wounded from the blasts, while a health ministry source put the toll at 13 killed and about 150 wounded.
Meanwhile, gunmen with silenced weapons opened fire on a police checkpoint in Bayaa in south Baghdad, killing three policemen, the interior ministry official said. The toll was confirmed by the health ministry source.
And a suicide car bombing and mortar rounds killed one person and wounded 12 in Samarra, a Sunni-majority city north of Baghdad that houses the Shia Al-Askari shrine, which is visited by tens of thousands of pilgrims each year.
The shrine was bombed in February 2006, triggering a wave of sectarian bloodshed in which tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed.
The violence was brought under control only after Sunni tribes turned against the insurgents and the United States sent in thousands of additional soldiers in a troop ‘surge.’
The suicide bomber targeted a police checkpoint at the southern entrance of Samarra, killing an Iranian pilgrim and wounding 10 other people.
Seven Iranian pilgrims, two police and a soldier were wounded, a police lieutenant colonel and a medical source from Samarra hospital said.
Two more Iranian pilgrims were wounded by two mortar rounds that exploded in the area, the same sources said.
With the latest violence, at least 160 people have died in attacks in Iraq mainly targeting the Shia community in the past 10 days — more than the number of people killed during the entire month of May, according to official figures.
On June 13, 72 people were killed in a string of attacks across the country that were later claimed by al-Qaeda’s front group, the Islamic State of Iraq.
They included a car bomb that killed seven on the outskirts of Kadhimiyah, the site of the shrine of revered Shia imam Imam Musa Kadhim, and another blast in Karrada in central Baghdad amid Shia pilgrims’ food tents, killing 16.
Three days later, two car bombs targeting Shias commemorating Imam Kadhim’s death in 799 killed 32 people in the capital.