News

Car Bombs Kill 24 in Iraq

by Ana Maria Defillo

In a seemingly endless tide of violence, two bombs killed 24 people and wounded 47 in Iraq on Thursday.

The deadlier of the two bombs was buried under a load of vegetables in a pickup truck and exploded in a market north of Baghdad.

The blasts occurred in the city of Samarra and the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib. These attacks are proceeded by a slew of car bombings and other attacks from the day before that killed at least 82.

The pickup truck bomb was responsible for the most deaths on Thursday in a market in Samarra, killing 18 and wounding 32. Samarra is a largely Sunni Muslim city.

The second car bomb from Thursday was in Abu Ghraib (yes, that Abu Ghraib) in the western outskirts of Baghdad, and killed six and wounded 15.

There's been no claim of responsibility for the attacks. It's very common for al Qaeda to detonate car bombs in areas largely populated by civilians in the hopes of maximizing the amount of deaths to undermine the public's confidence in the Shiite-led government.

Since April, over 4,000 people in Iraq have died in coordinated bomb attacks that occur at least once a month. The consistent number of attacks have reached levels unseen since 2008.

Some speculate that the ongoing conflict in neighboring Syria is also responsible for the country's increase in Sunni-Shiite confrontations.