BAGHDAD, April 13: A car bomb killed 15 people and injured 22 in a Baghdad neighbourhood on Thursday.
The blast was the latest in a string of attacks that have shaken central Iraq, where feuds among the country’s Shias and Sunnis have resulted in bloodshed since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
In another provocative attack, the brother of prominent Sunni politician Tareq al Hashemi and his companion were killed on Thursday in a drive-by shooting in central Baghdad, police and sources from Hashemi’s Islamic Party said.
Hashemi’s party is the leading member of the Sunni National Concord Front coalition, which holds 44 seats in parliament.
An Iraqi government official said about 10,000 families have fled the Iraqi capital itself amid rising sectarian violence.
“We estimate that 10,000 families have been displaced and this number will increase,” the official said.
“Just for Baghdad, the number of families has reached 3,991,” he said, adding that the displaced tend to come from mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhoods.
At the end of last month, authorities estimated that 4,000 to 5,000 families had been displaced across Iraq.
DEATH SQUAD: On Thursday, Sunni politician Saleh Mutlak, whose coalition holds 11 parliament seats, accused government-linked death squads of killing 68 people who had been detained from Baghdad’s Al Dura neighbourhood on April 4.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr Solagh on Wednesday acknowledged the existence of so-called death squads within certain security forces but denied any link with his own ministry.
The US and Iraqi forces have nearly doubled patrols in Baghdad over the last two months in order to assert control over the increasingly chaotic situation.
From an average of 12,000 patrols in February in Baghdad, the US and Iraqi forces have raised the patrols to 20,000.
More than 30 US troops have been killed since April 1 and the overall US military death toll since the invasion has reached 2,365.—AFP
