BAGHDAD, July 11: A new spate of bombings, shootings and gunbattles left more than 40 people dead across Iraq on Tuesday, including 10 people massacred in an apparent sectarian attack in Baghdad.
The persistent violence, which came despite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s calls for national unity, renewed fears of a full-fledged civil war and prompted MPs to demand an explanation from security ministers for the deteriorating situation.
In Tuesday’s deadliest attack, 10 people carrying a coffin in a minibus were ambushed and killed by gunmen on a highway near Baghdad’s volatile neighbourhood of Dura, a defence ministry official said.
They were heading to the holy city of Najaf to bury the corpse, the official said. The attack came less than two hours after the lifting of a curfew imposed on Dura on Monday.
The US military, meanwhile, condemned an Internet video posted by Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch showing the mutilated bodies of two American soldiers it claims to have killed last month.
Al Qaeda said it had killed the two soldiers — Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker — to avenge the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by soldiers of the same unit to which the two soldiers belonged.
In ousted president Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, the wife of the provincial governor was killed in a bomb explosion as she treated patients in her clinic, police said.
Ameera al-Rubaie, a gynaecologist, was killed and four of her patients wounded in the attack which involved a time-bomb left in her surgery room, an officer said.
Earlier, at least six Iraqi soldiers were killed in a gunbattle in the province, pitting government and US troops against suspected Al Qaeda militants, the Iraqi army said.
Maj-Gen Anwar Hama Amin said the soldiers died in a joint operation with US troops in Al-Salman village following the killing of three soldiers who made a visit there on Monday.
The local Al Qaeda commander, Jassem Salama, who was ‘wanted for the killing of at least 30 Iraqis and was feared for beheading his victims,’ was also killed in the fighting, Amin said.
In Baghdad, five people were killed and 10 wounded in a car bombing and a suicide bombing near the heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government. In the upscale Mansur district of the capital, gunmen shot dead five Iraqi employees of a Saudi Arabian company travelling in a truck, police said.
Another 15 people were killed in other attacks, including two civilians in a car bombing in the Al-Amil neighbourhood where earlier on Tuesday an Iraqi diplomat was abducted by gunmen.
