Story by the Associated Press; curated by Dave Urbanski
BAGHDAD (AP) — A dozen children killed when a suicide bomber detonated the explosives-laden car he was driving near their elementary school in the north of the country Sunday, officials said.
A wounded Iraqi child is given medical care at a hospital in the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk on October 6, 2013. Bombers detonated explosives-rigged vehicles at a police station and a primary school. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)
A total of 33 were killed in Sunday's blasts, officials said.
Added to the 75 killed in Saturday's attacks, the weekend death toll in Iraq has passed 100.
The attacks are the latest in a relentless wave of killing that has made for Iraq's deadliest outburst of violence since 2008. The mounting death tolls are raising fears that the country is falling back into the spiral of violence that brought it to the edge of civil war in the years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Sunday's blasts began around 9:30 a.m. in the Shiite Turkomen village of Qabak, just outside the town of Tal Afar. The area around the stricken village has long been a hotbed for hard-to-rout Sunni insurgents and a corridor for extremist fighters arriving from nearby Syria.
One car bomb in the tiny village targeted an elementary school while children ages 6 to 12 were in class as another struck a nearby police station, Tal Afar mayor Abdul Aal al-Obeidi said.
The dead included 12 children, the school principal and two policemen. Another 90 people were wounded, he said.
Wounded Iraqi children rest after receiving medical care at a hospital in the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk on October 6, 2013, following a bombing at his school in the Turkmen Shiite village of Qabat, near the Syrian border. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)
The village is home to only about 200 residents, and part of the single-story school collapsed as a result of the blast, he said. Tal Afar is 260 miles northwest of Baghdad.
"We and Iraq are plagued by Al Qaeda," al-Obeidi said. "It's a tragedy. These innocent children were here to study. What sins did these children commit?"
Wounded Iraqi children rest after receiving medical care at a hospital in the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk on October 6, 2013, following a bombing at his school in the Turkmen Shiite village of Qabat, near the Syrian border. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)
A wounded Iraqi girl with her head bandaged sits on a hospital trolley after receiving medical care at a hospital in the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk on October 6, 2013. Bombers detonated explosives-rigged vehicles at a police station and a primary school. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)
Another suicide bomber, this time on foot, blew himself up hours later as Shiite pilgrims walked through the largely Sunni neighborhood of Waziriyah in the north of the Iraqi capital.
At least 12 people were killed and 23 wounded in that attack, according to police and hospital officials.
It was the second time in less than 24 hours that a suicide bomber managed to thwart security checkpoints and target Shiite pilgrims making their way to a golden-domed shrine in northern Baghdad where two revered Shiite saints are buried.
A suicide bombing in the largely Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah, not far from the site of Sunday's attack, late Saturday killed 51, authorities said as they revised the death toll upward. That and other attacks Saturday left a total of 75 dead, including two television journalists shot on the job.
Later Sunday, a bomb hidden in a parking lot exploded in Baghdad al-Jadidah, a district in the east of the Iraqi capital that has both Sunni and Shiite areas. That blast killed six and wounded 12, according to police and hospital officials.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest attacks, but suicide bombers and car bombs are frequently used by Al Qaeda's Iraq branch. It often targets Shiite civilians in an effort to undermine the Shiite-led government. Its extremist ideology considers Shiites heretics.
The police and hospital officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to brief reporters.
United Nations figures released last week showed that at least 979 people, most of them civilians, were killed last month alone. At least 135 have died violently since the start of October, according to an Associated Press count.
Here's a report on the latest violence in Iraq from BBC News via YouTube:
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