Baghdad: Three farmers were among six people killed in a series of attacks in Iraq on Thursday, police and doctors said, as the country struggles to curb the worst violence since 2008.
A magnetic ‘sticky bomb’ killed a man and his wife, both farmers, in the Dujail area as they drove to work, while another farmer was shot dead by gunmen near Balad, officials said.
Another four people were wounded when a roadside bomb went off as police arrived at the scene of the Balad attack. Dujail and Balad are located north of Baghdad.
The deadliest attack, however, was when a roadside bomb killed three young men in the town of Wajihiyah, northeast of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province.
Areas to the north of Baquba have been hit by numerous attacks in recent days, including a bombing on Wednesday that killed three children at a popular swimming area.
The latest unrest brings to 430 the number of people killed in attacks so far in July and more than 2,690 since the beginning of the year.
Iraq has faced years of attacks by militants, but analysts say widespread discontent among members of its Sunni community, which the Shiite-led government has failed to address, has driven the spike in unrest this year.
On Wednesday, a bomb blast in a teahouse in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul killed at least seven people on, police and medics said.
Medics said they had received the corpses of six men and one child following the attack in the Bab Laqash neighbourhood of Mosul, 390km north of the capital Baghdad.
“We used to go to this teahouse after prayers. Tonight when we got close to it we heard a big explosion inside. At first we thought it was a gas cylinder, but police told us it was an explosion. We saw smoke and flames coming out,” 45-year-old witness Haj Hassan said.
It was not clear who was behind the attack, but Sunni Islamist insurgents, including the Al Qaida-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq, have been regaining strength in recent months, security sources say.
Some 460 people have been killed in militant attacks so far in July, according to violence-monitoring group Iraq Body Count.
Increasing bloodshed has stoked fears that Iraq is sliding back into all-out conflict, though it has yet to match the sectarian carnage of 2006-07 when monthly death tolls sometimes topped 3,000.
On Thursday, the United Nations envoy to Iraq, Martin Kobler, said the country risked going down a “dangerous path, pot-holed with sectarian violence at each turn, leading to increased instability”.
