NAJAF: At least 51 people were killed across Iraq on Thursday. A suicide bomber killed at least 35 people and wounded over 90 on Thursday near a Shia shrine in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, dealing a blow to fresh efforts to avert a sectarian civil war. Hospital sources said the bomber blew himself at a police commando checkpoint on his way to the Imam Ali shrine, one of the most revered sites in the world for Shia and an annual destination for thousands of pilgrims. Dr Riyadh al-Shibli said 35 were killed and 94 wounded. Shia al-Forat television channel said there were two attacks, including the suicide blast, in the city which is home to Iraq’s top Shia clerics. “Suddenly my cart and the cans and the people were flying through the air,” said Moussa Khadhan, a 37 year-old street vendor, who was nearby at the time. The blast ripped through the checkpoint as the United States boosted its troop levels in Baghdad, some 160 km to the north, in another attempt to ease communal bloodshed tearing the capital apart. Ambulances drove through the streets of Najaf appealing for blood donations as the scale of carnage became clear and the number of injured rose. Television pictures showed the body of a child being laid besides other bloodied corpses on a patch of ground beside a hospital. The dead, marked with numbered white labels on their foreheads for identification, included both police and civilians, police and hospital sources said.
Meanwhile, at least 13 people were killed across Baghdad on Thursday as US and Iraqi security forces began executing the new phase of a security plan for the capital. Insurgents ambushed and killed the head of a national police brigade and six officers while they were carrying out a raid in the flashpoint neighbourhood of Al-Maalif in southwest Baghdad, medics and a defence official said. “Seven, including the colonel, were killed in the battle,” a Defence Ministry official said, adding that the officers had been ambushed by insurgents during a raid intended to seize a major weapons cache.In another incident not far from Al-Maalif, six people were killed when a bomb exploded in a busy restaurant in Baghdad’s Saydiyah neighbourhood, an Interior Ministry official said.