Suicide bomber kills at least 38 in Baghdad

PanARMENIAN.Net - A suicide bomber driving a minibus blew himself up outside a cafe in a mainly Shi'ite Muslim district of the Iraqi capital on Sunday, Oct 20, killing at least 38 people, police and medics said, according to Reuters.

At least 12 people were killed in a spate of suicide bomb attacks on security personnel and government buildings earlier in the day, police said.

Violence in Iraq, which had eased after reaching a climax in 2006-07, is now rising again, with more than 7,000 civilians killed this year, according to monitoring group Iraq Body Count.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for any of the attacks, but Shi'ites are viewed as apostates by Sunni Islamist militants whose insurgency has revived this year.

The explosion on Sunday evening took place in Baghdad's Amil neighborhood.

On Oct 12, a car bomb exploded in a street lined with shops in the Iraqi city of Samarra on Saturday, , killing at least 13 people. A further 18 people were wounded in the blast in the city's al-Shurta distric

Sectarian tensions in Iraq and the wider Middle East have been exacerbated by the Syrian civil war, which has drawn Sunnis and Shi'ites from across the region and beyond into battle.

Al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate was forced underground in 2007 but has been invigorated by the war in Syria and by growing Sunni resentment of Iraq's Shi'ite-led government, which came to power after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Nearly 1,000 Iraqis were killed in September, one of the highest monthly death tolls in years, the UN said.

Iraq is going through its worst surge in violence since 2008, with near-daily militant attacks and relentless bombings blamed on hard-line Sunni insurgents. The surge followed a deadly crackdown by the Shiite-led government on a Sunni protest camp in northern Iraq in April. More than 5,000 people have been killed since then.

A statement from UNAMI said the mission recorded the deaths of 979 Iraqis in insurgent attacks in September. They included 887 civilians while the rest were members of security forces and Iraqi troops.

The figure was slightly lower than the UN's July death toll, which stood at 1,057, but still one of the highest in years.

The report said the worst-affected part was the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, where 418 people were killed in September. It said 2,133 people were wounded in last month's violence.