BAGHDAD — The head of the U.N. refugee agency scolded nations Sunday for deporting Iraqis back into danger, delivering his criticism on a day when insurgents rattled the Baghdad area with a series of bombings that killed 10 people.
Antonio Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, said an estimated 2,000 Iraqis have been fleeing their homeland every month, including a “significant number of Christians.”
But some countries have turned back dozens of refugees — forcing many to return to some of Iraq’s most violent regions.
“There are still some areas in central Iraq in which we believe people should not be sent back against their will,” Guterres told reporters after meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.
Guterres did not identify the countries deporting Iraqis, but they are thought to include Sweden, which accepted thousands of Iraqis during the height of the war.
Underscoring the continued danger, a spate of bombs rocked the capital and its suburbs Sunday, killing 10 people over a three-hour span. The bombs struck indiscriminately, with the dead including police officers, pilgrims, farmers, commuters and schoolchildren.
Police and hospital officials said at least 34 more people were injured.
The assaults Sunday were the latest in a series of bombings that have killed more than 120 people since Tuesday, shattering a two-month period of relative calm.
The deadliest attacks included a suicide bombing Tuesday against police recruits in Tikrit that killed at least 50 people and a string of blasts near Karbala that claimed 65 lives, many of them Shiite religious pilgrims.
On Sunday, the Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaeda front group, claimed responsibility for the Tikrit attack as well as two bombings last week at security force headquarters in Baqouba that together killed 10 people.
No group has claimed responsibility for Sunday’s bombings. A senior Iraqi intelligence official blamed them on insurgents seeking to take advantage of the government’s delay in appointing a new interior minister, who runs the nation’s police forces.
