KIRKUK, Dec 11: At least 26 people were killed in violence across Iraq on Monday including a pregnant woman and three of her children who were savagely gunned down in the north of the country.
The US military also reported that two powerful roadside bombs had killed four of its soldiers on Sunday, keeping December on track to be one of the deadliest months for American soldiers so far this year.
Armed men burst into the home of a pregnant Shia Kurdish woman and sprayed her and her children with bullets in the town of Salaja, 75 kilometres south of Kirkuk, Iraq’s northern oil city.
Three of her children, aged between five and 13, were killed while two other daughters survived the fusillade.
Police could give no motive for the attack, but noted that her husband was a Turkmen and a member of the old army.
The area around Kirkuk, a fragile mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, both Sunni and Shia, experiences occasional flare-ups in sectarian violence driven by Sunni militant groups.
A suicide car bomb exploded in front of the home of Brigadier General Aras Namuq al-Kaki, head of the Kirkuk police’s major crimes department, including terrorism, wounding him and 14 others, six of them seriously.
The brigadier’s house was destroyed and those of his neighbours badly damaged while four other cars set ablaze in a blast which police are attributing to the Sunni extremist Ansar al-Sunna group.
Nine people were shot dead in the restive province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, including three policeman, in a series of incidents, police said.
In Iraq’s other main northern city of Mosul, four brothers from the minority Shabak religion were killed in a drive-by shooting on the east side of the city, while a policeman was shot dead in front of his home.
Just north of Baghdad, in the town of Dujail, gunmen hijacked a minibus carrying five primary school teachers on their way to work and kidnapped them, said police at the joint coordination centre in Tikrit. Once again, police could not comment on the motive, but predominantly Shia Dujail has come under increasing pressure from the overwhelmingly Sunni countryside since Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced to death for crimes against humanity against the Shiites of Dujail in the early 1980s.
Further kidnappings took place in central Baghdad, when gunmen in four pickup trucks pulled up at the Istithmar (Investment) bank and seized four employees who were about to enter the bank with money.—Agencies
