IRAQ:Car bombs killed 18 people in Baghdad yesterday and gunmen shot dead 23 workers after pulling them off a minibus in Iraq's northern city of Mosul in an apparent revenge attack.
South of Baghdad, the US military said that it carried out airstrikes on an al-Qaeda meeting location, killing 15 alleged militants. Ground forces later killed another three combatants in the operation, the military said.
Among the attacks in Baghdad, two suicide car bombers rammed their vehicles into a police station in a mostly Shia neighbourhood, killing 12 people and wounding 95. Most of the dead were said to be civilians.
"Look at the situation Iraqis are living in. You see blasts whenever you try to go out to earn a living," said one witness.
In a separate attack, a car bomb in a Shia enclave in the mostly Sunni neighbourhood of Saidiya in southern Baghdad killed six civilians and wounded 37 people, police said.
In Mosul, gunmen killed 23 textile workers from the minority Yazidi sect after forcing them out of a minibus.
Brig-Gen Mohammed al-Waggaa said that the mass killing appeared to be in retaliation for an incident in which a Yazidi woman was stoned to death several weeks ago for converting to Islam.