Clashes and shelling on Sunday in and around the conflict-hit Iraqi city of Fallujah, which lies just a short drive from Baghdad, killed 22 people, a doctor said.
The unrest, which also left 36 wounded, struck in multiple areas of Fallujah and its outskirts, Ahmed Shami said at the city’s main hospital yesterday.
Tribal leader Mahmud al-Zobaie said the violence broke out at midday and went on for hours.
He said shelling hit a half-dozen neighborhoods in northern, southern and central Fallujah, while Iraqi security forces engaged in clashes with anti-government fighters on the city’s northern and southern outskirts.
More than 350 people have been killed in the Fallujah area since militants took control of the city at the start of the year, Shami said, adding that most of the casualties were civilians caught in army shelling.
Security forces have shelled Fallujah for months and repeatedly tried to storm the city in a bid to retake it, but anti-government fighters have held sway over it.
Human Rights Watch last month said that Iraqi authorities have likely violated the laws of war by targeting Fallujah hospital.
The crisis in the desert province of Anbar, which borders Syria and of which Fallujah is a part, began in late December last year, when security forces dismantled a longstanding protest camp maintained by the province’s mainly Sunni Arab population to vent grievances against the government.
Militants subsequently seized parts of the provincial capital Ramadi and all of Fallujah, the first time anti-government forces have exercised such open control in major cities since the peak of the deadly violence that followed the US-led invasion of 2003.
Figures separately compiled by the UN and Iraq’s government showed more than 900 people were killed last month alone, with bloodletting at its worst since 2008, when Iraq was emerging from a brutal Sunni-Shiite sectarian war.
Officials blame external factors for the rise in bloodshed, particularly the civil war in neighboring Syria, and insist wide-ranging operations against militants, especially in Anbar, are having an impact.
However, the violence has continued unabated, while analysts and diplomats insist the Shiite-led government must do more to reach out to the disaffected Sunni minority to undermine support for militancy.
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