The weekend brought little respite for many Iraqi’s, especially in Baghdad. 09 – 11 June saw some the worst fighting and high impact strikes of the past 3 weeks.
On Sunday 09 June a suicide bomber blew up his explosive-packed car at a police checkpoint outside a Shi'ite district in northwest Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least seven people and wounding 16 more. Most of the victims of Sunday's bombing were ISF manning a checkpoint to the Kadhimiya neighbourhood, where an intelligence services base and the Kadhimiya Shrine, a major Shi'ite Muslim religious site, are located.
The reporting period closed on a somewhat sour note as tensions intensified over Monday / Tuesday leaving as many as 70 people dead. Most of the apparently coordinated violence hit the north of the country and included at least eight suicide blasts as well as fierce skirmishing at military bases and checkpoints. In the city of Mosul, suicide bombers and rocket fire struck an ISF headquarters, killing 24, many of them police and soldiers, and in an extension of the previous weeks efforts insurgents have also continued to try and target key O&G infrastructure in the north of the country with the ISF confirming that they had once again defused bombs planted at two oil wells near the northern city of Kirkuk.
In Baghdad province car bombs and a suicide attack tore through food markets in two Iraqi towns north of Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 21 people. Local sources said two car bombs exploded whilst a suicide bomber in another vehicle detonated his explosives in a food market in the mostly Shi'ite Muslim town of Jadidat al-Shatt in Diyala province, 40 km north of the capital. The triple blasts left 13 dead and more than 50 wounded among the wreckage of fruit and vegetable stalls. Further afield another car bomb hit a market in the religiously-mixed town of Taji, 20 km north of Baghdad, killing at least eight more people and two roadside bombs also exploded near a cafe, killing four people in the Shi'ite district of Sadr City, northeastern Baghdad.
By way of conclusion: It is likely that in the short term we will see a similar pattern developing to the those seen these past couple of weeks, namely that of weekly spikes in violence as mainly Sunni insurgents continue to try to exploit the damage done by the GoI post the national local elections. Whilst Iraq is experiencing heightened sectarian tension and violence, in the very short term the country appears to have stepped back from the brink we saw it at some 3 – 4 weeks ago and despite the remaining challenges and near daily bloodletting there seems to be a dampening of the tensions and emotions that gripped the country in the wake of the government crack down at Haweeja, which appears to have resulted in a slow down in the near catastrophic levels of community violence.
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