A spate of apparently co-ordinated attacks across Iraq on the eve of the Islamic New Year killed 19 people and wounded more than 150 others on Wednesday, officials said. The 13 bombings and shootings struck in Baghdad and nine other cities, the security and medical officials said, and will likely raise tensions in a country mired in political deadlock and which suffered a brutal sectarian war.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the violence. Wednesday's deadliest blasts struck in Kirkuk, a disputed ethnically mixed oil-rich province in north Iraq frequently targeted by militants seeking to sow communal violence, where at least nine people were killed and 39 wounded. Two car bombs and a roadside blast in Kirkuk's eponymous capital killed five people and wounded 34 others, while another explosives-packed vehicle targeting an army patrol in the town of Hawijah, also in Kirkuk province, left four dead and five others wounded, officials said.
"My child was killed! His friends were killed!" Shukriyah Rauf screamed in Kurdish at the site of the worst of the Kirkuk city attacks, where a car bomb and a roadside explosion in a majority-Kurdish neighbourhood killed five. Nearby buildings and vehicles were badly damaged, with shrapnel, garbage and bloodstains on the street. Also south of the capital, in the town of Hafriyah, another car bomb left four dead and 15 wounded, while a car bomb near Baghdad's Firdos Square, the site famous for Iraqis pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein shortly after the 2003 US-led invasion, killed one person and wounded six others.
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