[Al Ahram] A spate of apparently coordinated attacks across Iraq on the eve of a Mohammedan festival marking the Islamic new year killed 15 people and maimed more than 100 others on Wednesday, officials said.The 11 bombings and shootings struck in Storied Baghdad
...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate...
and six 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 grabbed credit 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 thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time...
a disputed ethnically mixed oil-rich province in north Iraq frequently targeted by Death Eaters seeking to sow communal violence, where at least nine people were killed and 39 maimed.
Two car booms and a roadside kaboom in Kirkuk's eponymous capital killed five people and maimed 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 maimed, officials said.