Serial bomb attacks kill 51 Iraqis, injure 286

A BARRAGE of bombings in northern and central Iraq yesterday targeted a minority village in the north and two districts in Baghdad, killing at least 51 civilians and wounding 286.

In a televised statement, prime minister Nuri al-Maliki warned that violence could rise ahead of the parliamentary election in January. Insurgents, he stated, “will try, in any way they can, to show that the political process is not stable”.

In the worst incident, twin truck bombs destroyed 30 houses and killed 35 in Khazna village, east of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

The village is inhabited by Shabak, a community of 35,000 ethnic Kurds professing a simple form of Shiism. Some of the Shabak who settled there had fled violence in Mosul, a city of 1.6 million, where US and Iraqi government troops face remnants of al-Qaeda. While al-Qaeda is routinely blamed for such attacks, Sunnis seeking to block Kurdish territorial expansion are also likely culprits.

Khazna is situated in a wide band of territory controlled by militiamen from the Kurdish autonomous region. The Kurds seek to annex large swathes of this territory belonging to neighbouring Nineveh, Tamim and Diyala provinces as well as the city of Kirkuk and its oilfields.

Khazna’s Shabak have opted to join the Kurdish region but complain that the Kurdish militiamen do not provide protection.

An attack on an ethnic Turk village by a truck bomber last Friday killed 44 people. While this community is Shia, it is likely that the perpetrators were out to kill Turkomen because they reject Kurdish ambitions.

Ethnicity in the mixed north can be a more potent source of conflict than sect.

Five bombs also exploded in Baghdad early in the morning. The first detonated in a pile of rubbish, killing seven workers in Amil, one of the few remaining mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhoods.

Ten minutes later, a car bomb blew up in the nearby Shurta area at a meeting point for construction workers, killing nine. Three bombs went off in the Sunni Adhamiyya district, wounding a member of a government-backed militia.

This string of bombings is the second this month and seems to mark a departure in the tactics of the bombers, who are carrying out well-co-ordinated serial attacks rather than single strikes. Last Friday 44 Shias died in Mosul and 10 in Baghdad. So far, Shia militiamen have refrained from responding to these provocations.

Those who conducted mass killings and ethnic cleansing of Sunnis during 2006 and 2007 largely belonged to the disbanded al-Mahdi army militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who is now living in exile in Iran.

The latest bombings coincide with the removal of concrete slab blast walls from public buildings and markets in the capital following an announcement by Mr Maliki and the US military that the security situation was improving.

Mr Maliki is eager to show that normality is returning to Iraq ahead of the election. Iraqis deeply resent barriers that hinder movement around the capital.