Bomb blasts kill 62 in Iraq, PM seeks world help
Print Edition
Bombs hit Iraq’s capital Baghdad and a village near the northern town of Baquba yesterday, killing at least 62 people, as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki warned that militants were trying to set up an “evil statelet.”
In the deadliest incident, a bomb blew up in a funeral tent where mourners were marking the death two days ago of a Sunni Muslim pro-government militiaman. It killed 18 people and wounded 16 in Shatub, a village south of Baquba.
Violence has climbed back to its highest levels since the Sunni-Shiite bloodshed of 2006-2007, when tens of thousands of people were killed.
The army is locked in a standoff with Sunni militants who overran Falluja, a city west of Baghdad, more than two weeks ago in a challenge to Maliki’s Shiite-led government. They are led by the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is fighting in western Iraq and Syria to carve out a cross-border Islamist fiefdom.
“The battle will be long and will continue,” Maliki said on state television, calling for world support. “If we keep silent it means the creation of evil statelets that would wreak havoc with security in the region and the world.”
Maliki has ruled out an assault on Falluja by the troops and tanks ringing the city, but has told local tribesmen to expel ISIL, which has exploited anger among minority Sunnis against a government they accuse of oppressing them.
Al-Qaida loyalists are pursuing a relentless campaign of attacks, mostly aimed at security forces, Shiite civilians and Sunnis seen as loyal to the Shiite-led government.
At least eight bombs struck the Iraqi capital, mostly in Shiite districts, killing 40 people and wounding 88, police said. A car bomb in Dujail, a Shiite town north of Baghdad, killed three people and wounded seven.
The bombings followed attacks that cost at least 24 lives the day before, as well as coordinated assaults by militants on a highway bridge and police station near Falluja.
A suicide bomber in an explosives-laden fuel tanker blew it up under the bridge near the town of Saqlawiya, about 10 kilometers north of Falluja, causing the bridge to collapse and destroying one of two army tanks parked on top.
Simultaneously, dozens of militants stormed a police station in Saqlawiya. Helicopter gunships attacked the police station, but failed to evict the militants.
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