Suicide attack kills 16 at Sunni funeral in Baghdad

A suicide attacker has killed 16 people and wounded 35 others at a Sunni funeral in Baghdad.

Police said a suicide bomber detonated his explosive belt inside a tent where the funeral was being held in Baghdad’s southern neighbourhood of Dora yesterday.

The incident came a day after a wave of attacks, some on a Shia funeral in Baghdad, killed 104 people.

Violence has spiked in Iraq in the past few months. More than 4,000 people were killed between April and August.

Two separate bombings left two security force members dead and 37 people wounded in the country’s north. In the first attack, a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into a residential area in the city of Kirkuk, wounding 35. Bombers targeted a Kurdish educational office and an adjacent house for a Christian lawmaker. Kirkuk is home to an ethnic mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen who all have competing claims to the oil-rich area.

Hours after the suicide bombing, police said a roadside bomb struck a security convoy near the northern city of Mosul, killing two soldiers and wounding two others.

Meanwhile, authorities raised the death toll for a deadly double suicide attack on a funeral inside a Shia neighbourhood in eastern Baghdad a day earlier. The new death toll brings to 78 the number of people killed. – (AP)