BAGHDAD, Sept 18: Sixty-two people were killed around Iraq on Monday — 21 of them in a suicide attack on people waiting for their butane gas ration cards in the northern city of Tall Afar.
A suicide bomber, wearing an explosive belt, approached a crowd waiting for the ration cards in downtown Tall Afar, and exploded himself, a police official said. Two policemen were among the dead and 17 were wounded.
The day’s other big attack came in Ramadi, where a bomber struck near a police station, killing 13 people.
The police station oversees the restive Tamim neighbourhood, one of the more dangerous areas of Ramadi, capital of Al-Anbar province.
Al-Anbar has been a key battleground in the conflict between US troops and guerillas and the province has accounted for the bulk of the US military’s losses.
In other attacks, 28 people were killed, including four members of a Shia family shot dead by gunmen as they attempted to flee their homes north of Baghdad.
After receiving repeated threats in their home in the restive provincial capital of Baquba, the family packed their belongings in a pickup truck and fled, only to be stopped on the road by gunmen who riddled their car with bullets, killing four and wounding five.
Gunmen also killed two other people busy packing up their belongings in a small town just to the west of Baquba, while 10 other people, three of them soldiers, were killed elsewhere in Diyala, a province where sectarian violence is equalled only by that in Baghdad itself.
The violence came even as the Iraqi government gave an optimistic assessment of the impact of a massive security operation in Baghdad and the return of displaced families to newly pacified neighbourhoods.
“We have statistics from the army unit in Ghazaliyah that some families have come back to their neighbourhoods,” said Iraqi military spokesman Brig Qassem al-Mussawi, referring to a largely Sunni neighbourhood of the capital.
In the past week, however, the violence has spiked with dozens of bodies turning up everyday, including 14 in the heart of the capital alone on Monday.
“These numbers announced by the media are not accurate,” retorted government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh when asked about the worsening death toll.—AFP
