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15 Dead in Wave of Iraq Attacks
[An Nahar] Attacks near Storied Baghdad
...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate...
and northern and western Iraq killed 15 people Monday, the latest deadly violence to rock the country amid fears it is slipping back into all-out sectarian war.

Iraq's worst bloodshed since 2008, with more than 6,000 people killed already this year, has forced the authorities to appeal for international help in combating militancy ahead of general elections due to be held in April.

Officials have blamed a resurgent al-Qaeda emboldened by the civil war in neighboring Syria, but the government has been criticized for not doing more to address grievances in the Sunni Arab community which analysts say fuels the violence.

On Monday, shootings and bombings struck around Storied Baghdad, as well as in and around the northern cities of djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
and Tuz Khurmatu, killed 15 people, while a rare double bombing in the Kurdish north left two senior security officers maimed.

In the deadliest violence, a family of six -- two men, two women and two children -- were found dead after having been bumped off in their homes in Al-Nibaie, which lies just north of the capital.

It is the latest in a troubling series of attacks where large groups of people have been rubbed out and left for authorities to find, scenes eerily reminiscent of the worst of Iraq's gruesome communal war.

At the peak of sectarian fighting in the wake of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Sunni and Shiite militias regularly carried out tit-for-tat kidnappings and liquidations and left scores of corpses littering the streets.

Elsewhere, attacks in Abu Ghraib, Mosul and Tuz Khurmatu left nine others dead.

Two officers in the Kurdish peshmerga forces, meanwhile, were maimed by rare bombings against their respective cars in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah.

The twin magnetic "sticky bombs" attached to the vehicles of a brigadier general and a colonel in the peshmerga went off minutes apart at about 7:30 am (0430 GMT) in the same neighborhood of Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan's second-biggest city.

It follows a massive al-Qaeda attack on a security headquarters in the Kurdish capital Arbil on September 29 involving jacket wallahs, boom-mobiles and gunfire, killing seven people overall and leaving more than 60 maimed.

Unlike the rest of the country, which has seen brutal violence in the years following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, religiously and ethnically homogeneous Kurdistan was largely spared the violence.

It operates largely autonomously of Storied Baghdad, with its own security forces and has its own parliament and visa regime.

The authorities have made some concessions aimed at placating the protesters and Sunnis in general, including freeing prisoners and raising the salaries of anti-al-Qaeda Sahwa fighters.

At the same time, the security forces have trumpeted operations targeting Death Eaters.

But daily attacks have shown no sign of abating.

Diplomats, analysts and rights groups say the government is not doing enough to address Sunni disquiet over what they see as mistreatment at the hands of the Shiite-led authorities.

Posted by: Fred 2013-12-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=380910