Baghdad, Iraq – Three suicide car bombings struck within an hour and two parked motorcycles exploded in northern Iraq on Thursday, while gunmen in speeding cars opened fire on a crowded market in Baghdad in a series of attacks that killed at least 38 people.
Violence during the past days has claimed the lives of at least four children, two U.S. soldiers and a Sunni Muslim cleric, underscoring the rampant, random nature of an insurgency that has killed at least 810 people since the April 28 announcement of Iraq’s new Shiite-led government, according to an Associated Press count.
Twenty people were killed as a wide swath of northern Iraq was hit by three suicide car bombings within an hour.
A restaurant in Tuz Khormato, 50 miles south of the northern city of Kirkuk, was struck during breakfast hours Thursday, killing at least 12 people, including a bodyguard of Iraq’s Kurdish deputy prime minister, Rowsch Nouri Shaways, and wounding 40, said the Iraqi Defense Ministry and police.
The blast set ablaze eight cars in the restaurant’s parking lot, the focal point of a bloody scene that U.S. and Iraqi police quickly cordoned off.
Earlier in Kirkuk, a suicide car bomber targeting a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers carrying civilian contractors killed four Iraqi bystanders, including a child, and wounded at least 11 others, said Dr. Bassam Mohammed of Kirkuk Emergency Hospital. None of the occupants in the convoy was injured.
Another suicide bomber killed four people and wounded four in Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, police Col. Mudhafar Mohammed said. The victims included Hussein Alwan al-Tamimi, 41, deputy head of Iraq’s northeastern Diyala provincial council since January, and three bodyguards.
A new online posting purportedly by the al-Qaeda group in Iraq has declared the creation of a new cell of suicide bombers called the “al-Bara bin Malek Brigade” and claimed it already has carried out a number of unspecified attacks.
Elsewhere, two parked motorcycles rigged with explosives detonated near a coffee shop frequented by policemen, killing five Iraqis, wounding 13 and destroying several shops in Mosul, Iraqi police said.
Gunmen firing randomly from three speeding cars also killed nine Iraqis in a crowded market area in Baghdad, a Defense Ministry official said.
Also Thursday, a roadside bomb blast forced a car off the road in Mahmudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad, killing three.
