BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber detonated explosives among a group of men seeking police jobs Thursday, killing 16 people around a recruiting station in northwestern Iraq despite warnings of an attack.
The blast in the town of Sinjar, about 240 miles northwest of Baghdad, occurred about three weeks after U.S. and Iraqi forces launched an offensive to drive al-Qaeda in Iraq out of Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq and the terrorism movement’s last major urban stronghold.
No group claimed responsibility for the blast, but suicide operations are the signature attack of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The blast could have been aimed at relieving pressure on al-Qaeda fighters in Mosul, 75 miles to the east.
The mayor of Sinjar, Dakhil Qassim, said security services had received tips that police recruiting centers in the area would be targeted and had issued a warning the day before urging people to stay away from them.
But jobs in the police and army are so prized in parts of the country where unemployment runs high that a large crowd of desperate jobseekers showed up anyway, hoping to be accepted as recruits, Qassim said.
The dead included 14 would-be recruits and two policemen, Qassim said. Another 14 people were wounded, he added. The Interior Ministry announced that the station commander had been fired for failing to protect the volunteers.
Also Thursday, in Awja, the town near Tikrit where Saddam Hussein is buried, gunmen hiding in a water tanker opened fire on police and pro-U.S. Sunni fighters at a checkpoint, police said.
Security forces returned fire, killing a dozen gunmen. The driver blew himself up with an explosive belt, police said.
To the north, a suicide bomber driving a police vehicle blasted Iraqi commandos in Mosul, killing three troopers and wounding nine other people, according to battalion commander Capt. Aziz Latif.
In Baghdad, assailants hurled grenades at a minibus carrying Iraqi army recruits, killing two men and wounding five other people, including a woman bystander, a policeman said.
Despite ongoing attacks, death tolls among Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops have dropped sharply in Iraq this month. An average of 17 Iraqis have been killed by violence each day in May as of Wednesday, according to an Associated Press tally.
That’s the lowest level since December 2005.
