Up to 14 people were killed, including an anti-Qaida leader, in a twin suicide bombing in a northern Baghdad neighborhood on Monday, raising fears of a return to violence after a period of a relative lull in the past months.
One suicide bomber detonated a vest packed with explosives at the entrance of the office of the Sunni Endowment, a government agency that looks after Sunni mosques and shrines, at about 11a.m. (0800 GMT) in Baghdad's northern neighborhood of Adhamiyah, an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The second suicide bomber set off a car bomb as a crowd of the U.S. and Iraqi government-backed Awakening Council group members and security forces were gathering outside the building to evacuate the casualties of the first blast, the source said.
Most of the victims were Awakening Council group members, the source said, adding that Riyadh al-Samaraie, a former police Colonel and a leader of the Sunni Arab security groups that is attributed with helping to reduce sectarian bloodshed in the country over the past six months, was among the dead.
Abu Nadeem, an official in the Sunni office told Xinhua that at least ten people were killed, including the son-in-law of the lawmaker Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the Accordance Front, a major Sunni bloc in the Iraqi parliament.
While Tha'ir, a guard in the attacked office, said "I saw about twenty bodies scattered at the entrance of the office and Colonel Samarie, his son and six of his guards were among the killed."
Brigadier Qasim Atta al-Moussawi, spokesman of the Baghdad security plan, said there is some evidences indicate that Qaida in Iraq network is behind the attack.
Dozens of worried people gathered outside the Nu'man Hospital in the neighborhood to identify the victims of the attack, while U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and the Awakening Council fighters spread in the neighborhood to secure the area after the attack, witnesses said.
The U.S. bankrolled Awakening Council groups, like the one led by Samarrai, have sprung up in former insurgency strongholds in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, fighting al-Qaida and providing security for key infrastructure such as mosques and schools.
The Sunni groups have turned their rifles toward the al-Qaida network after the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities in the war-torn country.
The attacks against the Awakening groups came after the to pleader of Qaida Osama Bin Laden released an audiotape at the end of last year, warning Iraq's Sunni Arabs against joining the Awakening groups or taking part in the government.
Also in the day, three people were killed and 16 others were injured when bomb detonated in a stall in a crowded market place near the University of Technology in eastern Baghdad, the police said.
In separate incident, two roadside bombs went off coordinately near a police patrol in the Jadriyah area in Baghdad central neighborhood of Karradah, wounding two policemen and a civilian, they said.
In northern Iraq, a huge fire flared at the country's main oil refinery in the town of Baiji, 200 km north of Baghdad, killing a worker and wounding 15 others, according to a local police source.
It was yet to know whether the fire caused by a technical fault or an act of sabotage, as the police is investigating the incident.
According to U.S. figures, the violence across Iraq has dropped to 60 percent over the past six months, but insurgents adamantly stepped up campaign of suicide bombings to kill large number of people.
(Xinhua News Agency January 8, 2008)
