At least 21 people were killed across Iraq on Sunday, as US reinforcements rolled into some of the most violent districts of Baghdad to halt Iraq’s slide towards civil war. Fifteen people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the midst of mourners in Tikrit, the hometown of former president Saddam Hussein, police said. At least 30 others were wounded in the attack, they added. The suicide bomber arrived at a hall located in the centre of Tikrit where people were gathered to mourn the death of the father of provincial council member Saab Abd Badaywi. The bomber parked an explosive-laden car outside the building and then entered the hall where he blew himself up, a police officer said.An Interior Ministry official said that clashes between Iraqi security forces and Mehdi militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr had also erupted in Baghdad’s Shiite dominated Sadr City district. Units of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team were deployed in flashpoint districts in the west of the capital, which in recent weeks has seen hundreds of civilians murdered by sectarian death squads. As they arrived in Baghdad, the blasts of two roadside bombs echoed around the city and security forces recovered 20 corpses across Baghdad – four Iraqi soldiers and 16 civilians who had been tortured and shot dead, police said. One bomb wounded two Iraqi police commandos and two civilians in the Jihad neighbourhood, an Interior Ministry official said. The Stryker Brigade had already completed 12 months in the restive region around the northern city of Mosul, and had begun to head home to Alaska when they were ordered to Baghdad for the next 120 days.
General George Casey, the head of coalition troops in Iraq, said last week on a US military website that the Baghdad deployment was key to his strategy. Two months ago, IraqÂ’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced a plan to restore security by deploying 43,000 Iraqi police and army and just over 7,000 US troops around Baghdad. But the plan has failed to contain the violence, as daily bombings target police and civilians and faceless death squads kidnap, torture and shoot more than a dozen victims daily.