Iraq bombings kill 19 on eve of Muslim new year

A spate of apparently coordinated attacks across Iraq on the eve of a festival marking the Islamic new year killed 19 people and wounded more than 150 others on Wednesday, officials said.

The 13 bombings and shootings struck in Baghdad and nine other cities, the security and medical officials said, and will likely raise tensions in a country mired in political deadlock and only relatively recently emerged from a brutal sectarian war.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the violence, but al-Qaeda’s front group in Iraq frequently carries out coordinated bombings and attempts mass-casualty attacks in a bid to destabilise the government through fomenting bloodshed.

Wednesday’s deadliest blasts struck in Kirkuk, a disputed ethnically mixed oil-rich province in north Iraq frequently targeted by militants seeking to sow communal violence, where at least nine people were killed and 39 wounded.

Two car bombs and a roadside blast in Kirkuk’s eponymous capital killed five people and wounded 34 others, while another explosives-packed vehicle targeting an army patrol in the town of Hawijah, also in Kirkuk province, left four dead and five others wounded, officials said.

“My child was killed! His friends were killed!” Shukriyah Rauf screamed in Kurdish at the site of the worst of the Kirkuk city attacks, where a car bomb and a roadside explosion in a majority-Kurdish neighbourhood killed five.