Weekly Security Update 12 - 19 September 2013

Saturday saw Mosul also come under attack as insurgents, most likely Sunni, targeted a Shia minority group with a suicide bomber who killed at least 21 people at the funeral of a member of Iraq's Shabak minority in the northern province of Nineveh.  Mosul has been somewhat quieter of late however the influx of Syrian Kurd refugees and the insurgent elements that have reportedly followed may well have already had  an impact on the fragile peace, something that will most likely continue in the coming weeks.

As the weekend followed the focus on violence shifted once again to Baghdad, surrounding provinces and Basra.

A wave of car bombs and shootings across Iraq killed at least 36 people on Sunday with the deadliest attacks in the city of Hilla, where two parked car bombs exploded simultaneously near a busy market and a third blew up near vehicle repair workshops, killing nine people in total.

In Baghdad's Shi'ite eastern district, a parked car bomb exploded in a commercial street killing at least five people and wounding 17 and a further 3 security personnel were killed when a car bomb exploded near the convoy of the head of Baghdad provincial council, with a further two killed when a roadside bomb blew up in a western outskirt.

The violence pitched both north and south as the day went on. Another explosion took place in the southern city of Basra, where a car bomb blew up near another vehicle repair workshop killing five people and further north car bomb in the city of Kerbala also killed two others.

In Dibis 250 km north of Baghdad further two car bombs exploded inside a market killing two people and wounding another 16 whilst in a separate incident, gunmen riding a car shot dead two Shi'ite farmers who had recently returned to their homes and in the same area militants engaged in clashes with policemen at a checkpoint, killing two of them.

In what is becoming very commonplace in Baghdad police said they found the bodies of four Sunnis who were kidnapped from their homes last night by unidentified gunmen, handcuffed and then shot execution style.  Later in the reporting week a similar incident took place when children discovered the handcuffed and blindfolded corpses of 10 unidentified young men in eastern Baghdad, apparently killed by gunshots to the head.  Police said residents told them unusual vehicle movements to and from an abandoned building in the area had caught the attention of the children, who waited until the cars had left to investigate.

The reporting period ended with a series of attacks across Iraq, which killed at least 32 people.   The deadliest attack took place in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah in western Iraq, where three suicide bombers attacked a police station killing at least eight people, local sources reported, whilst in the capital, a series of car bombs exploded in Shi'ite neighborhoods in southern and eastern districts, killing at least 15 people.