A roadside bomb followed by a suicide bomber detonating an explosives-rigged truck at a police checkpoint in northern Iraq killed 28 people Monday, while four people died in other attacks. Militants have launched major operations in five different provinces in recent days, killing scores of people and highlighting both their long reach and the weakness of Iraq's security forces.
Iraq is suffering its worst violence in years, and with none of the myriad problems that contribute to the heightened unrest headed for quick resolutions, the bloodshed is likely to continue unabated. Local official Shallal Abdul Baban said the blasts at the police checkpoint in Tuz Khurmatu killed 28 people, wounded 148 and caused "great destruction".
The checkpoint that was targeted was near an office of President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party. Another suicide car bombing struck an army checkpoint south of the city of Baquba on Monday, killing two soldiers and wounding five, while two more people died in attacks in Baghdad, officials said. The violence came a day after a car bomb followed by a suicide bombing near a PUK office and a Kurdish intelligence building in Jalawla, another northern town, killed 18 people.
Powerful jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed the Jalawla attack in a statement posted on Twitter, and said it was carried out by two suicide bombers, one Egyptian and an Iraqi Kurd. And violence elsewhere in Iraq killed 13 more people on Sunday. Jihadists have in the past five days launched a series of major operations that have killed dozens of people. On Saturday, militants took hundreds of hostages at Anbar University in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the last of whom were freed in an assault by security forces that sparked hours of fighting. And a series of blasts in Baghdad on Saturday night killed at least 25 people. In Mosul, heavy fighting broke out on Friday and continued into the following day.
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