[An Nahar] A roadside kaboom maimed four people, including two coppers, near a small church in the Iraqi capital on Easter Sunday, medical and security officials said.The bomb went off near the entrance of the Sacred Heart church, which is surrounded by concrete blast walls, near Tahriart Square in central Storied Baghdad.
...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate...
Two passing civilians and two coppers were maimed, an interior ministry official and doctor at Ibn Nafis hospital said.
The church was empty at the time as Easter services were held earlier in the day, the building's security guards said.
Security officers at the site barred news hounds from entering the church, but confirmed the casualty toll.
A pick-up truck belonging to federal police and a civilian saloon car were badly damaged by the blast, an Agence La Belle France Presse news hound said.
Shards of glass were also scattered across the road in front of the church, which was briefly closed off as forensics teams analyzed the scene and the damaged vehicles were towed away.
The number of Iraqi Christians has dwindled from an estimated between 800,000 and 1.2 million prior to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein to about 400,000 today.
Most of them live in Storied Baghdad, the area surrounding the northern city of djinn-infested Mosul and parts of the autonomous Kurdistan region in the north of Iraq.
In other violence in Iraq, army General Abdul Ghani Mohammed was maimed by a magnetic "sticky bomb"
????(magnetic car bomb?)
Some variant of a limpet mine?
attached to a military vehicle in the al-Amriyah neighborhood in the west of the capital, the interior ministry official said.
A roadside kaboom also went
kaboom!near the Iranian embassy in the center of the capital, but no casualties were reported.
And in the northern ethnically divided city of Kirkuk,
... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time...
an Iraqi army captain was killed by a "sticky bomb" early on Sunday morning, local police said.
The latest violence comes with just months to go before a year-end deadline for the fewer than 50,000 U.S. troops currently in the country to withdraw, under the terms of a bilateral security pact.
Violence has dropped off dramatically across Iraq since its peak in 2006 and 2007, when tens of thousands were killed in nationwide sectarian bloodshed. But attacks remain common, especially in the capital.
A total of 247 people were killed in violence in Iraq in March, according to official figures.