BAGHDAD: At least 31 people were killed including two American soldiers in a string of attacks across Iraq on Wednesday, including a dozen people who lost their lives in a rush hour bombing in Baghdad and two US troops slain by an Iraqi comrade.
In the deadliest single attack of the day, a booby-trapped car exploded, followed by another bomb blast at a bus station in a working class district of Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 60, according to the interior ministry.
In the chaotic northern city of Mosul, an Iraqi soldier opened fire on his American comrades, killing two and wounding another six, according to the US military and the Iraqi ministry of defence.
Iraqi officials said the soldier opened fire after an altercation with US troops during a patrol through the city, but a senior US military commander said the shooting was unprovoked and took place inside an Iraqi army base.
It was the second such incident this year in the volatile northern city, though there have been no other accounts of Iraqi soldiers killing US soldiers since the end of the 2003 US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
Elsewhere in Mosul — which the US military call one of the last bastions of Al-Qaeda in Iraq — two Christian sisters were slain by gunmen who broke into their home and wired it with bombs.
The intruders killed Lamia and Walaa Sabih and wounded their mother before booby-trapping the house. When police arrived a bomb went off, wounding two of them, an officer said on condition of anonymity.
The US military said in a statement that five bombs were placed in the home and that two exploded.
The women — one the mother of three children — both worked for the provincial council, which condemned the attack.
More than 2,000 Christian families fled Mosul in October after a wave of killings there.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Tuesday that some Christians were starting to return, with around a third of the families in one neighbourhood coming back to their homes.
After the latest killings the governor of the Nineveh province, where Mosul is the capital, transferred the head of security for the province to Baghdad and appointed a replacement, a senior military official said.
The order “came after Nineveh witnessed violent operations, especially during the last month, including the dispersal and targeting of hundreds of Christian families,” the official said, adding that Baghdad had been forced to send another two brigades to Mosul.
More than 200 Iraqi Christians have been killed across Iraq since the 2003 invasion and a string of churches have been attacked, with the violence intensifying in recent months, particularly in the north.
Another six people were killed on Wednesday in a string of bombings in Baghdad, which has seen near-daily attacks in recent days, most targeting security forces, despite an overall improvement in security over the past year.
Four people were killed, including two policemen, and another 14 were wounded by a bomb near Saadun Street, a main thoroughfare through the heart of the city.
Another car bomb exploded later in a residential neighbourhood in northeast Baghdad, killing two people and wounding another 10, police said.
The attacks came two days after 28 people were killed and dozens wounded in a triple attack in a market in the Sunni district of Adhamiyah, the bloodiest Baghdad bombing since June.
Major General Qassim Atta, a spokesman for the Iraqi army in Baghdad, said in a statement that security forces were stepping up efforts “to prevent an increase in terrorist operations in the capital.”
He added that they would deploy sonar equipment to try to detect explosives would also boost their intelligence-gathering operations.
