Dozens dead in series of Iraq attacks

At least 33 dead and scores wounded in spate of blasts and shootings across country as violence spikes during Ramadan.

Iraq violence
In the southern city of Nasriya, two car bombs left one dead and 12 injured [Reuters]

At least 33 people have been killed and almost 100 wounded in deadly attacks across Iraq as violence escalates during Ramadan, security and hospital officials say.

Al Jazeera’s Jane Arraf, reporting from Baghdad, said that three roadside bombs near markets in southern city of Basra killed at least seven people on Sunday.

A suicide bomb attack inside a Sunni mosque in the southern town of Hilla in Baghdad killed 12 and wounded 15 others, our correspondent reported from the capital, Baghdad.

In the southern city of Nasriya, two car bombs left one dead and 12 injured, while a car bomb killed three people and wounded 15 in Karbala city, 100km southwest of the Iraqi capital.

At least six people were killed in shootings and bombings earlier on Sunday in the northern city of Mosul, and an equal number were killed in a suicide bomb attack in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad.

In Kirkuk on Monday, a parked car bomb targeted a police patrol, killing one policeman and injuring 10 other people, six of them police officers.

Arraf reported security sources as saying that the bomb detonated in the Wasiti neighborhood close to the location of a suicide bombing at a cafe late on Friday that killed more than 30 people in the city.

Violence in Iraq has spiked since the start of Ramadan.

Our correspondant said Islamic State of Iraq and other al-Qaeda affiliated groups are launching attacks in Ramadan to create more chaos and destabilise the country.

“Different groups, some of them fighting with each other, launching these attacks not just to attack the security forces, but to show people that their own security forces can not protect them” she said.

The attacks are just the latest in a surge in violence that has killed more than 340 people this month and over 2,600 so far this year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.

Iraq has faced years of attacks by fighters, but analysts say widespread discontent among Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority which the Shia-led government has failed to address has driven the spike in unrest this year.

Sectarian tensions have been inflamed by the civil war in neighbouring Syria, which is fast becoming a region-wide proxy war, drawing in Shia and Sunni fighters from Iraq and beyond to fight on opposite sides of the conflict. 

Source: Al Jazeera, News Agencies