Insurgents killed 28 people in Iraq on Saturday, including 23 in Baghdad, security sources said. Gunmen killed 12 people and kidnapped dozens more when they ambushed three minibuses south of the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Saturday, a security source told AFP.
The source said the attack took place when the buses passed through Latifiyah in the so-called Sunni "triangle of death" south of the capital. "Gunmen set up a fake checkpoint on the highway heading to the city of Diwaniyah and ambushed these buses near Latifiyah," he told AFP.
The source said two of the passengers escaped and told police that 12 people were executed by the gunmen, while "dozens more were abducted". Armed men from Shiite and Sunni gangs often kidnap people from rival communities and execute them.
Eight civilians were killed and 38 wounded when a car bomb and a roadside bomb exploded simultaneously in a market in central Baghdad's Hafidh al Qadi area, a security source said.
A number of car bombs have exploded in various markets across Baghdad in the past few days after the lifting of a curfew imposed during the sentencing of Saddam Hussein on November 5. Two more roadside bombs in Baghdad killed another two people dead and five wounded, the source said.
Gunmen shot dead an Iraqi intelligence officer in south Baghdad. Tahsin Ali Mahmud was ambushed as he was driving through Baya neighbourhood, the source said. In another attack, gunmen killed a policeman and a woman in the city of Baquba, north-east of Baghdad, police said, adding that another civilian was similarly shot dead.
A policeman was also shot dead by gunmen near the Iranian border in the town of Zarbatiya, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of the city of Kut, police said. Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier Abdel Karim Khalaf said that during the week ending Wednesday, 39 policemen were killed and 170 others wounded across Iraq.
Khalid Ismail, a Christian working as a translator at the American base, Delta, west of Kut, was kidnapped on Saturday, police said. An Iraqi soldier was also shot dead by gunmen in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, police captain Imad Jassim Mohammed said.
He said gunmen in an Opel car opened fire on Abdallah Mustafa Mohammed in front of his house in east Kirkuk. The captain said a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in southern Kirkul wounded four people. Police also recovered six bodies, including one of a woman, from in and around Baghdad. They were believed to be victims of sectarian killings.
Dozens of bullet-riddled bodies surface across Iraq every week, mostly in Baghdad where the Shiites and the Sunnis are engaged in a bitter sectarian conflict. Nearly 100 people have been killed in the past four days as violence returned to Baghdad and other regions after a lull during the curfew. Iraq is engulfed in a bitter sectarian conflict that has killed thousands of people, mostly in Baghdad.