Suicidal Person Blows Up 30, Injures 70 Shia Pilgrims in Iraq

[웃 910]

Iraq suicide attack kills 30

Bomber targets Shia pilgrims in southern Iraq hours after Baghdad blasts killed 30, adding to concerns over sectarian violence

A suicide bomber targeting Shia pilgrims in southern Iraq has killed at least 30 people and wounded 70 others, hours after an earlier wave of attacks in mainly Shia districts of Baghdad killed at least 29 people and wounded dozens more.

Local security sources said the attack on the pilgrims happened at a police checkpoint just west of Nassiriya, 185 miles south-east of Baghdad, on Thursday.

The first of the Baghdad attacks came in Sadr City in the north-east of the Iraqi capital. One bomb was planted on a parked motorcycle and the other was a roadside device, a police source told Reuters. At least 12 people were killed.

"There was a group of day labourers gathered, waiting to be hired for work. Someone brought his small motorcycle and parked it nearby. A few minutes later it blew up, killed some people, wounded others and burned some cars," a police officer at the scene said.

A Reuters reporter said there were bloodstains around the scene of the motorcycle bomb attack, and tarmac on the road had been ripped up by the explosion. Building tools and shoes were scattered across the site.

Half an hour later, a roadside bomb exploded near a small tea shop in the same neighbourhood, killing one person. Police said they found and defused two other bombs. Less than two hours after that, two blasts hit the Shia district of Kazimiya, in the north of the city, killing at least 16 people.

Iraq is still plagued by a deadly Sunni Muslim insurgency and Shia militias nearly nine years after the US-led invasion.

"People have real fears that the cycle of violence might be revived in this country," Tariq Annad, a government employee who lives near the site of the Sadr City attacks, told Associated Press.

A political crisis that erupted shortly after US troops withdrew from Iraq on 18 December has revived concerns about sectarian violence in Iraq, which teetered on the brink of civil war in 2006-07.

The Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia, angered rivals when he asked parliament to have his Sunni deputy, Saleh al-Mutlaq, removed and sought an arrest warrant for the Sunni vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi, on charges that he ran death squads.

On Tuesday, members of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc boycotted Iraq's parliament and cabinet, accusing Maliki's bloc of governing alone in a power-sharing coalition that had been supposed to ease sectarian tensions.

Bombings on 22 December in predominately Shia parts of Baghdad killed 72 people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/05/iraq-suicide-attack-kills-30

[MyLittlePony 340]

Did we pull out the troops too soon? Should we have stayed there for another 10 years?