BAGHDAD, April 14. A surge of violence killed 28 people in the past 24 hours in Iraq, among them 12 members of the Kurdish peshmerga forces who died in a bomb blast near the Syrian border, officials said on Monday.

The country’s north bore the brunt of the violence, with the attack on the peshmerga troops at the town of Rabiyah, three car bombs exploding in separate incidents in the main city of Mosul, and a suicide bomb attack on a funeral in the town of Tal Afar.Local police said the car bomb parked on the side of the road near Rabiyah, 120 kilometres northwest of Iraq’s main northern city of Mosul, exploded as a vehicle carrying peshmerga troops drove by, killing 12 and wounding five.

The Kurdish security forces form part of the Iraqi army.

At Tal Afar, 80 km west of Mosul, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of people attending a funeral, killing four people and wounding 35, police said.

The attack was “against a wake being held in memory of an Iraqi soldier killed two days ago,” the US military said in a statement on the incident.

Police in Mosul, meanwhile, said insurgents exploded three car bombs separately in the city centre, including one against a passing patrol of US and Iraqi troops which killed one person and wounded six.

In another incident, two policemen and eight civilians were wounded when a parked car bomb exploded after police found it parked on a roadside in Al-Ugaidat neighbourhood, a local police officer said.

A third car bomb exploded in Mosul’s Mahatta neighbourhood but caused no injuries, he said.

Violence in Baghdad, meanwhile, killed 11 people, including five civilians who died when they were struck by a roadside bomb in the city centre aimed at a police patrol.

The bomb attack struck at around 11:00 am (0800 GMT) in Nidhal Street, one of the embattled capital’s main thoroughfares, Iraqi security and medical officials said.

Five passers-by were killed and nine people wounded, two of them policemen, a security official said.

A roadside bomb killed a US soldier in Iraq’s central province of Salaheddin on Monday, the American military said, without elaborating.

The US military, meanwhile, said six “criminals” were killed late on Sunday by American forces in east Baghdad, where security forces have been battling Shiite militiamen since April 6 in fierce clashes in which around 90 people have died.

The clashes have been focused mainly in Sadr City, bastion of the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which is still under partial curfew amid warnings by the Iraqi army that its streets are strewn with roadside bombs planted to impede US and Iraqi security forces.

A top US general said on Monday that American and Iraqi forces plan to stay put in a southern sector of Baghdad’s Sadr City rather than push deeper into the Shiite bastion.—AFP