Two bombs killed one person and injured 100 others in northern Iraq today, police said, in what appeared to be an attack on the country's Christian minority.
A car bomb and a roadside bomb went off near buses carrying university students close to the turbulent and ethnically diverse city of Mosul, 390km north of Baghdad. The dead man was a Christian shop owner near the blast scene, police said.
The buses were transporting the students from the mainly Christian town of Hamdaniya, 40 km east of Mosul.
"All of them were Christian students. They go in buses like that to Mosul's university after the troubled times when Christians were targeted in the past," Nissan Karoumi, mayor of Hamdaniya said.
Sunni Islamist insurgents such as al Qaeda have long targeted Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, and other Iraqi minorities, as well as majority Shia. Christians number an estimated 750,000, a small minority in a country of about 30 million people.
Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, is in the midst of a longstanding feud between Arabs and minority Kurds over land, power and wealth.
Overall violence has dropped in Iraq in the past couple of years but bombings remain a daily occurrence. A series of attacks over the past weeks underscored the country's fragile security situation as it struggles to end years of sectarian violence and move ahead with rebuilding.
Tensions have risen since a March 7th parliamentary election that produced no clear winner and left a power vacuum as political factions jockey for position in a new government.
Reuters