By IINA,
Baghdad/Kabul : Scores of people were killed and many injured in suicide attacks that took place in Iraq and Afghanistan today and yesterday. In Iraq, a suicide bomber has killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens more at a funeral being attended by Sunni Arab tribesmen opposed to Al Qaeda. Police said the bomber blew himself up inside the funeral tent in the village of Abu Munasir, in Anbar province, west of Baghdad on Wednesday. Forty people were wounded. No group has come forward to say it carried out the attack. Police said the funeral was for Taha Obaid, a school headmaster who had been shot dead a day earlier.
The funeral attack occurred as Nouri Al Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, decided to take personal charge of a military operation to rout al-Qaeda in Iraq in what the US describes as the terror group’s last major stronghold, even as a tenuous cease-fire took hold over Baghdad’s Sadr City slum. Al-Maliki’s flight to Mosul, 360 km northwest of the capital, mirrors a trip he took almost two months ago to the southern city of Basra, where government troops fought Shia fighters. Also yesterday in the south of Iraqi capital, Baghdad, a young girl strapped with explosives killed an Iraqi captain and wounded four soldiers. Ahmed Ali, an Iraqi army lieutenant, said the explosives were detonated by remote control as the girl approached the Iraqi officer. Both Iraqi and American spokesmen confirmed that the attack took place.
Meanwhile, at least 18 police and civilians were killed in a suicide attack in Afghanistan’s western province of Farah today, officials said.
The blast took place in a bazaar near a police station in Del Aram district of Farah, they said. Officials near the site said the bomber may have been wearing a burqa similar to what Afghan women commonly wear, Farah’s governor said. “I know that 18 people have been killed, but do not know whether the bomber was a man or woman or was wearing burqa or not,” said a police officer from Del Aram. Two police vehicles were destroyed in the attack, he said.