Three bombs that targeted public markets and a fourth bomb placed outside a Shiite mosque exploded Monday night in Baghdad, killing 25 people and wounding dozens, the police reported.
The quadruple bombings appeared to be the latest in a wave of Sunni radical mayhem that has proliferated in Iraq and is playing an increased role in the war in neighboring Syria.
The first was a car bomb in the Ur neighborhood of northeastern Baghdad, a heavily populated Shiite area, that killed 10 civilians and wounded 26 near a public market. Another car bomb killed nine civilians and wounded 30 in a famous public market in the Karrada district. A third bomb exploded in a market in western Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, the police said, killing four civilians and wounding 15. A fourth bomb detonated near a Shiite mosque in the al-Amil neighborhood of southwestern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding nine.
In Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad, a roadside bomb aimed at an army patrol killed two soldiers and wounded two others, police sources reported.
In western Iraq’s Anbar Province, an incubator of Sunni radicalism, the police said a suicide bomber killed a police officer and wounded eight others at a checkpoint near the house of an important tribal leader who has allied with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad to fight Al Qaeda militants in Anbar.
The rise in Sunni radical militance has been tied in part to a series of daring but little noticed breakouts from Iraqi prisons that has freed hundreds of hardened jihadists who are now among the leaders and foot soldiers of the Sunni groups operating in neighboring Syria and in Iraq itself.
The prison breakouts partly reflect the breakdown of authority in Iraq since the United States military departed in 2011.
NY Times
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