BAGHDAD: Shelling and bombings across Iraq killed 28 people yesterday and militants blew up a key bridge linking the capital to the north, the latest in a surge of violence.
The bloodshed, which pushed the death toll for January to more than 800, comes in the run-up to a general election scheduled for April 30, and has stoked fears Iraq is slipping back into all-out conflict.
Shelling began late on Friday in the south Fallujah neighbourhood of Nazal and continued into the early hours yesterday, killing eight people including a young child, and wounding seven, said Doctor Ahmed Shami of the city’s main hospital.
Residents of the city on Baghdad’s doorstep blame the army for the shelling. Defence officials insist the military is not responsible.
Near Anbar provincial capital Ramadi farther west, security officials said they killed 20 militants in the Albu Faraj area, state television reported.
Fallujah and parts of Ramadi have been in the hands of anti-government fighters for weeks, some of them from the Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Violence also struck in the capital, and north of Baghdad yesterday, leaving 20 others dead.
A mortar attack in Jaizan, a Shia village just north of the confessionally mixed city of Baquba, killed six people and wounded two, security and medical officials said.
Car bombs in two Sunni-majority neighbourhoods of Baghdad killed three people and wounded more than a dozen, and a magnetic “sticky bomb” attached to a car killed a provincial government official in the capital.
Two policemen were killed by a roadside bomb in Balad, just north of Baghdad.
Four people were also killed in a flurry of attacks in Mosul, and three bombings in the ethnically mixed town of Tuz Khurmatu left four others dead.
Militants also bombed a bridge north of Baghdad, officials said.
AFP
