Bombs and battles hit northern Iraq, at least 40 dead

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs, suicide attacks and gun battles in cities across northern Iraq killed nearly 40 people on Monday in worsening unrest that has heightened fears of a return to sectarian civil war.

No group claimed responsibility for the series of attacks, but officials blame most of the violence that has killed nearly 2,000 people since April on Sunni Islamist insurgents linked to al Qaeda's local wing.

Growing violence has accompanied rising political tensions between Iraq's majority Shi'ite leaders and the Sunni community, who believe they have been marginalized since the fall of Saddam Hussein after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Early on Monday, two car bombs exploded and a suicide bomber in another vehicle detonated his explosives in a food market in the mostly Shi'ite Muslim town of Jadidat al-Shatt in Diyala province, 40 km (25 miles) north of the capital.

The triple blasts left 13 dead and more than 50 wounded among the wreckage of fruit and vegetable stalls, local officials and police said.

"I was selling watermelon and suddenly I heard a powerful blast at the entrance to the market. I fled from the dust and smoke when a second blast turned the place into hell," said Hassan Hadi, a wounded farmer being treated in hospital.

"I was hit in my leg and lay down in shock."

Another car bomb hit a market in the religiously-mixed town of Taji, 20 km (12 miles) north of Baghdad, killing at least eight more people, police and hospital sources said.

Later on Monday, at least 18 more people were killed in a wave of car bombing and gun attacks mainly targeting police checkpoints in northern cities like Mosul, Tikrit and Tuz Khurmato, security officials and hospital sources said.

Iraqi police also defused bombs planted at two oil wells near the northern city of Kirkuk, and while exports to Turkey's Ceyhan port were not affected, militants have increased attacks on oil facilities on which Iraq's economy heavily depends.

The recent violence is the worst since inter-communal bloodletting five years ago that killed tens of thousands and partitioned Baghdad into districts based on religious sect.

American troops left Iraq in December 2011, and although Iraqi forces are better equipped than at the height of the war, they lack the intelligence resources and air cover capability to track insurgents they enjoyed under U.S. military guidance.

The war in neighboring Syria, where Shi'ite Iran and the region's Sunni Gulf powers are backing opposing sides, has also put pressure on Iraq's own fragile sectarian and ethnic balance.

Invigorated by Syria's mostly Sunni revolt and Iraqi Sunni discontent, al Qaeda's local wing, Islamic State of Iraq, is regaining ground lost during its war with U.S. troops who left Iraq in December 2011.

(Reporting by Reuters correspondents in Baquba and Mosul, Gazwan Hassan and Mustafa Mahmoud, Suadad al-Salhy and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bombs-strike-iraqi-market-killing-least-13-071003458.html

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