Suicide car bombers attacked an elementary school and a police station
in a small northern Iraqi village on Sunday while another on foot detonated his
payload among Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad, killing at least 27 people including
children, officials said.
The attacks are the latest in a relentless wave of killing that has
made for Iraq's deadliest outburst of violence since 2008.
The mounting death tolls are raising fears that the country is falling
back into the spiral of violence that brought it to the edge of civil war in
the years after the 2003 US-led invasion.
Sunday's blasts began about 9.30am in the Shiite Turkomen village of
Qabak, just outside the town of Tal Afar.
The area around the stricken village has long been a hotbed for
hard-to-rout Sunni insurgents and a corridor for extremist fighters arriving
from nearby Syria.
One car bomb in the tiny village targeted an elementary school while
children ages six to 12 were in class as another struck a nearby police
station, Tal Afar mayor Abdul Aal al-Obeidi said.
The dead included 12 children, the school principal and two policemen.
Another 90 people were wounded, he said.
The village is home to only about 200 residents and part of the
single-storey school collapsed as a result of the blast, he said.
Tal Afar is 260 miles northwest of Baghdad.
"We and Iraq are plagued by al-Qaida," al-Obeidi said.
"It's a tragedy. These innocent children were here to study. What sins did
these children commit?"
Another suicide bomber, this time on foot, blew himself up hours later
as Shiite pilgrims walked through the largely Sunni neighborhood of Waziriyah
in the north of the Iraqi capital.
At least 12 people were killed and 23 wounded in the attack, according
to police and hospital officials.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised
to brief reporters.
It was the second time in less than 24 hours that a suicide bomber
managed to thwart security checkpoints and target Shiite pilgrims making their
way to a golden-domed shrine in northern Baghdad where two revered Shiite
saints are buried.
A suicide bombing in the largely Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah, not
far from the site of Sunday's attack, late on Saturday killed 51, authorities
said as they revised the death toll upward. That and other attacks on Saturday
left a total of 75 dead.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but suicide bombers and
car bombs are frequently used by al-Qaida's Iraq branch.
It often targets Shiite civilians in an effort to undermine the
Shiite-led government. Its extremist ideology considers Shiites heretics.
United Nations figures released this week showed that at least 979
people, most of them civilians, were killed last month alone. At least 135 have
died violently since the start of October, according to an Associated Press
count.
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