At least 16 Iraqis were killed in an upsurge of violence on Sunday, including five who died in a blast on Baghdad’s Palestine Street that targeted a passing police patrol, Iraqi security officials said.
The roadside bombing in the east of the capital missed the police patrol but killed the bystanders and wounded four others, a defence ministry source said. Al-Kindi hospital said two of the five dead were women.
Three policemen were killed when their patrol was targeted by a bomb in the traditional Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiyah in north Baghdad. Ten civilians and three other police officers were injured.
Three more people were killed in a bomb attack in southern Baghdad in a popular marketplace of Zafaraniyah neighbourhood.
Mortars fell on the parking lot and a checkpoint at the entrance to Baghdad international airport, said the interior ministry, wounding 18 people and temporarily closing the road to the airport.
Yarmouk hospital said three children were among the wounded in the area where people park and wait to pass through security checkpoints before taking special taxis to the airport itself.
In the north of the country, a roadside bomb in the remote hilly area of Hamreen area near Kirkuk hit a convoy of Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari’s bodyguards, killing three and wounding three, reported police.
The minister was not with the convoy.
In the oil-refining town of Baiji, the scene of much recent unrest, gunmen shot dead a man in front of his home before fleeing, said police, who said the victim may have been working for United States forces.
Insurgents in the far north of the country, in the restive city of Mosul, clashed with police in the city centre, leaving one police officer dead and three wounded.
East of the capital in Balad Ruz, near the Iranian border, an army patrol responding to a distress call from the home of an army lieutenant colonel was hit by a roadside bomb, wounding five soldiers.
Outside the nearby city of Baquba, insurgents late on Saturday destroyed two small shrines of local Shi’ite holy figures, the Abdullah bin Ali shrine in the village of Wajhiya and the Tamim shrine, both in mixed Sunni-Shi’ite areas.
To the east of Mosul, in the oil rich-city of Kirkuk, a bomb shortly after midnight wounded eight police officers on patrol, four of them seriously. Two police vehicles were destroyed.
Kurdish security officials in the ethnically mixed town also reported that the local leader of the extremist Islamic organisation, Ansar al-Sunna, died of his wounds after a police raid on his house.
In the restive Sunni city of Samarra, central Iraq, US and Iraqi army sweeps over the past few days rounded up more than 200 people for questioning in a counter-insurgency operation named Iron Triangle, the US military said.
”The search yielded IED [improvised bomb] materials, including blasting caps and detonation cords,” said Lieutenant Colonel Edward Loomis of the army’s 101st Airborne Division.
”During the operation, Iraqi police, Iraqi army and coalition forces initially detained 213 individuals,” he said. ”Five individuals suspected of being foreign fighters were among the 106 detained.” — AFP
