Bombings Kill Many Iraqis in Shiite Areas

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/world/middleeast/bombings-kill-many-iraqis-in-shiite-areas.html

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BAGHDAD (Reuters) — Bombings in Shiite areas of Baghdad and in northern Iraq killed more than 35 people on Wednesday, after weeks of violence by Sunni Islamist insurgents determined to set off sectarian confrontations.

Tensions between minority Sunni Muslims and the Shiites who now lead Iraq are at their highest since American troops pulled out in December 2011, with relations coming under more pressure by the day from the largely sectarian conflict in neighboring Syria.

A string of car bombings hit Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad on Wednesday evening, including one outside a cafe and another at a market, killing at least 22 people and wounding dozens more, the police said.

“I saw a bright flash, followed by a strong explosion that shook the building,” said Jabar al-Rubaie, a police officer at the scene of a bombing in the Sadr City district in Baghdad. “Glass was shattered everywhere. People immediately ran to the scene and started evacuating the wounded and the dead.”

One television channel broadcast images from the city’s Zaafaraniya district, where many houses were damaged and several cars were in flames. Ambulances evacuated victims and a man ran, holding a wounded child.

Several attacks singled out police officers. At least two officers were killed in northern Baghdad when a suicide bomber on a motorcycle blew himself up near a police patrol, while a roadside bomb killed a police officer in a town near Mosul, 240 miles north of Baghdad, the police and medical workers said.

Earlier, in the ethnically mixed northern city of Kirkuk, 10 people were killed when two car bombs exploded near government buildings.

As relations between Iraq’s Shiite, Sunni and ethnic Kurds come under growing strain, the coalition government — split among Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish political blocs — is hobbled by disagreements about how to share power.

But the conflict in Syria, where mostly Sunni rebels are trying to oust President Bashar al-Assad, who follows the Alawite offshoot of Shiite Islam, has also put pressure on Iraq’s delicate intercommunal balance.

Although violence is well below the height of sectarian violence in 2006 and ’07, when tens of thousands were killed, Sunni Islamist insurgents now carry out attacks almost daily to try to undermine the Shiite-led government. Militants linked to Al Qaeda, and other Sunni insurgents, are trying to use Syria’s civil war to gain legitimacy and tap into frustrations among Iraqi Sunnis, hoping to regain ground they lost during their long battle with American troops.