BAGHDAD — A double bomb attack on Sunni mourners in Baghdad killed 14 people Monday, the third day in a row in which funerals have been attacked amid a wave of bloodshed across Iraq, officials said.
Police say back-to-back blasts tore through a tent set up for the funeral of one of four people killed two days before when gunmen attacked a store selling liquor in the Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah. A security official said an additional 35 were wounded.
The Azamiyah shooting was believed to be carried out by hard-line Sunni militants, who are most likely to attack liquor stores in Sunni areas.
Monday’s attack came only one day after a deadly suicide bombing on another Sunni funeral in Baghdad that left 16 dead. On Saturday, a double suicide attack on a Shiite funeral killed 72 mourners.
Attacks on Shiite civilian targets — including funerals — are a hallmark of al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch. But it was not clear if the two attacks on Sunnis also were the work of al-Qaeda, which has been known to target Sunni rivals, or part of a growing number of apparent reprisal attacks by Shiites.
More than 4,000 people have been killed between April and August, a level of carnage not seen since the country was on the brink of civil war in 2004-08. The re-emergence of tit-for-tat retaliatory killings has raised fears that Iraq may be returning to that cycle of violence.
Earlier in the day, police said gunmen broke into the home of a Shiite family in a Sunni-dominated area south of Baghdad and killed three members of a family.
Two police officers say the militants attacked the house in the town of Youssifiyah early on Monday morning, killing the parents and their 16-year old son. Two other children, ages 12 and 14 years, were wounded.
