Evening blasts kill 30 in Baghdad
BAGHDAD - Bomb blasts tore through two Baghdad neighborhoods Wednesday evening, killing at least 30 people including several members of a wedding party, and extending a relentless wave of bloodshed roiling Iraq.
The attacks come as the country is experiencing its most sustained bout of violence since the 2011 US military withd r a w- al. More than 500 people have been killed since the start of May.
Wednesday’s deadliest attack struck a commercial street in the mixed SunniShiite Jihad neighborhood, killing 18 and wounding 42, police said. Many of those slain were in a wedding party that was passing by when the blast went off, according to authorities. The southwestern neighborhood was one of the earliest flashpoints in Baghdad’s descent into sectarian bloodshed in the years following the 2003 US led invasion. It housed mainly Sunni civil servants and security officials under Saddam Hussein’s regime, though many Shiites now live there too.
Many of Jihad’s Sunni residents earlier this year received threatening leaflets from a Shiite militant group warning them to leave. The group, the Mukhtar Army, is not known to have carried out car bombings in the past.
Another 12 people were killed and 31 were wounded when a roadside bomb and then a car bomb ex- ploded near a market, killing 10 people and wounding 25, police said.
Hospital officials confirmed the casualties. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. Car bombings in civilian areas are often the work of al-Qaida’s Iraq arm, which aims to undermine faith in the Shiite-led government.
The surge in attacks in recent weeks is reminiscent of the sectarian carnage that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war in 2006 and 2007. April was Iraq’s deadliest month since June 2008, according to a United Nations tally that put last month’s death toll at more than 700.
Earlier Wednesday, a senior member of an Iraqi Shiite militia that once fought the US military warned that Iraq is heading toward widespread sectarian bloodletting similar to the kind that once pushed the country to the brink of civil war.
The head of the political bureau of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq group, Adnan Faihan, also said the militia is preparing to defend itself, but denied the group’s involvement in a spate of attacks targeting Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority.
Iraq has been wracked by a wave of the most sustained violence the country has seen since American troops left in late 2011. The bloodshed, which includes coordinated car bombings blamed on Sunni militants as well as a string of attacks on Sunni mosques, is raising fears that Iraq is slipping back toward all-out sectarian fighting like that which nearly tore the country apart at its peak in 2006 and 2007.
“We have major concerns. Because what is going on now is the same that led to what happened in 2006,” Faihan told The Associated Press. “We are ready for it and we are ready to protect our people.”
Faihan made the comments on the sidelines of a press conference it held in Baghdad under heavy guard by camouflage-clad militia members.