Bomb attacks killed 75 people in Iraq yesterday, including 48 who died in twin truck bombings in the northwestern town of Tal Afar, police said. Among other attacks, suspected Al Qaida militants killed 21 people in bombings targeting police and Sunnis who have formed an alliance against the militants, officials said. The attacks follow an upsurge in violence in recent days. US and Iraqi security forces have deployed thousands more soldiers in Baghdad to try to stem a sectarian war that threatens to tear the country apart.One of the blasts in Tal Afar, a mixed town of Shiites, Sunnis and Turkmen near the Syrian border, was detonated by a suicide bomber in front of a Shiite mosque, police and witnesses said. Police Brigadier Karim Khalaf Al Jubouri said the bomber lured victims to buy wheat loaded on his truck. A second truck bomb exploded in a used car lot.
On Saturday, a man wearing an explosive vest blew himself up in Tal Afar, killing 10 people. In 2006, US President George W. Bush held up Tal Afar as an example of progress being made in Iraq after US-led forces freed it from Al Qaida militants in an offensive the previous year.
Near Ramadi, in western Anbar province, a suicide bomber exploded his car outside a restaurant on a main road, killing 17 people and wounding 32, a hospital source said. The restaurant was frequented by police in an area where local tribes have joined the tribal alliance against Al Qaida. Many police were among the casualties, the hospital source said.
Earlier four people were killed in two blasts in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. One of the dead was the son of tribal leader Shaikh Thahir Al Dari, said Ahmad Al Dulaimi, head of the provincial council media office in Anbar province. Dulaimi said it was a double suicide car bombing, but a relative of the shaikh, a member of the anti-Al Qaida alliance, said the son was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the car he was in. Another person was wounded in the car. Relatives blamed Al Qaida for the attack.
Dari's dead son, Harith Al Dari, is the nephew of his namesake who leads the Sunni Muslim Scholars Association, an influential body of hardline clerics. The cleric has spoken out against the anti-Al Qaida alliance that includes his own tribe. Thahir Al Dari is the head of the Al Zobaie tribe, to which Deputy Prime Minister Salam Al Zobaie belongs. The deputy prime minister was the target of an assassination bid last week.