Twin car bombs against factory workers and an apparently coordinated series of attacks targeting security forces killed 52 people yesterday in the worst violence to hit Iraq in more than two weeks.
In the deadliest attack, two explosives-packed vehicles detonated minutes apart in the car park of a textiles factory in the central city of Hilla, 95km south of Baghdad, leaving 20 people dead and 100 wounded, a hospital official said.
The blasts struck the State Company for Textile Industries at around 1:30pm as workers were leaving.
Baghdad was hit by a spate of shootings with automatic weapons against six police or army checkpoints in the east and west of the city, accounting for seven of the dead, an interior ministry official said.
Two other policemen died in three bombings in south and west Baghdad.
“The attacks started at 6:30am and ended around 8am,” the official said, noting that nearly all of the wounded were security personnel.
The attacks on checkpoints using silencers, intended to add an element of surprise and to sow confusion, showed a new tactic was being used by a weakened yet still dangerous Sunni Islamist insurgency after government forces dealt a series of blows to al-Qaeda’s local network in recent weeks.
A double bomb attack near the mosque in Suwayrah, 60km southeast of the capital, killed 14 people and wounded 70, a police lieutenant said.
There were also four bomb attacks on houses in and around the former Sunni insurgent bastion of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, three of which were owned by security officials.
Police and a doctor at Fallujah hospital confirmed a total of four people had been killed and 11 injured in the attacks.
Eight other people were killed in separate attacks near the main northern city of Mosul, in Iskandiriyah, south of Baghdad, and near Tarmiyah, north of the Iraqi capital.
The car bomb in Tarmiya targeted the convoy of the local mayor, officials said.
Yesterday’s death toll was the highest since April 23, when 58 people were killed in series of bombings in Baghdad and western Iraq, days after the government said al-Qaeda was on the run.
There were around 20 attacks in total yesterday.
Major General Qassim Atta, a security forces spokesman in Baghdad, said the attacks appeared to be coordinated.
“This was a message to us that they can attack us in different parts of the city at the same time because they have cells everywhere,” an Interior Ministry source said.
The latest violence came as Iraq headed towards forming a new government, two months after elections in which no clear winner emerged.
On Sunday, electoral officials said results from the March 7 vote were nearly finalised with totals from all but one province sent for ratification. A recount in the lone exception, Baghdad, is more than half done.
Overall violence in Iraq has fallen sharply since the height of sectarian warfare in 2006 and 2007, but the March 7 election that produced no clear winner has fuelled tensions.
Yesterday’s unrest comes after the number of Iraqis killed in violence last month fell slightly month on month but was almost unchanged from 12 months ago.
Figures compiled by the health, interior and defence ministries showed that 328 people — 74 civilians, 39 police and 15 soldiers — died as a result of attacks in last month, only slightly fewer than the 355 killed 12 months ago, but down slightly from March, when 367 people were killed in unrest.
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