Iraq: A suicide-bomber created carnage at a Shia funeral and guerrillas ambushed a fuel convoy outside Baghdad in a wave of attacks which killed almost 60 people yesterday, the bloodiest day in Iraq for weeks.
Car-bombs exploded in the capital and in the Shia holy city of Kerbala, suggesting a level of co-ordination which may be a response by Sunni Arab insurgents to last month's largely peaceful parliamentary elections.
The attack on the funeral was the bloodiest single incident since the election, killing 36 and wounding 40 in the town of Miqdadiya, 100km northeast of the capital.
This area is rapidly emerging as the most violent in the country, eclipsing the previous hotspots of Falluja and Ramadi to the west of Baghdad.
The victims were gathered at a cemetery to mourn a local member of the Dawa party, which is headed nationally by Ibrahim al-Jaffari, the Shia Islamist prime minister.
Assailants fired mortar-bombs, forcing the mourners to take cover amid the gravestones, before a bomber wearing an explosive vest blew himself up among them, security officials said.
UN secretary general Kofi Annan condemned the attack as a "horrendous crime committed against innocent civilians in total disrespect for human life and dignity", the UN's chief spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said in New York.
British foreign secretary Jack Straw, on a visit to Lebanon, described the attack as "mindless terrorism".
Soon after the cemetery attack, guerrillas with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns ambushed 60 fuel tankers north of Baghdad, destroying 20 of them, police and oil officials said.
A group calling itself the "Islamic Army in Iraq" claimed responsibility for the attack in an internet statement, saying that the convoy belonged to the "enemy occupier", a reference to the 150,000 US troops stationed in the country. At nightfall police said isolated clashes on the road were continuing and at least four people had been killed - a tanker driver and three members of the convoy's security team.
The convoy was part of a major government drive to ease fuel shortages in the capital following the recent closure of Iraq's main refinery at Baiji in the north. This refinery has now reopened and Iraq has begun to export oil again through its southern ports.
The oil ministry said that Iraq was shipping 1.5 million barrels per day, substantially more than the average for December, when exports slipped to a post-war low of just 1.1 million barrels.
In Baghdad's first fatal car-bomb attacks of 2006, at least 13 people were killed and 27 were injured. Five died when a vehicle was detonated in the northern Shia district of Kadhimiya and eight were killed in a second bombing close to a busy commercial market in the southern area of Doura, police and hospital sources said.
The violence occurred as Shia, Sunni and Kurdish politicians pledged to continue their efforts to form a government of national unity capable of stemming the bloodshed.
While much of the recent violence has been in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, the Shia holy city of Kerbala to the south has been relatively peaceful, and yesterday's car-bombing there was the first since December 2004. Police said that three civilians were injured.
The latest prominent kidnap victim was the sister of interior minister Bayan Jabor, seized in Baghdad on Tuesday.
Iraqi security forces launched a major operation to find her, shutting two major bridges over the River Tigris, closing parts of the city and setting up checkpoints.
The abduction occurred three months after Jabor's brother was kidnapped and held for one night.
Jabor, an Islamist Shia, is a hate figure for Sunni Arab guerrillas and has strenuously denied their allegations that his ministry condones Shia death squads targeting them. - (Reuters)