Bombings, shootings kill at least 20 across Iraq

                  
At least 20 people were killed and 35 wounded in bombings and shootings in Iraq on Wednesday, police and medical sources said.         

The worst surge in violence in at least five years has pushed Iraq further back towards all-out sectarian warfare, with insurgents stepping up bombing campaigns against security forces and civilians.          

Four suicide bombers targeted a police station in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, killing four policemen and wounding 15. Another attacked a police station just north of Ramadi, killing four officers and wounding seven, the sources said.          

A roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi army patrol in the western city of Qaim on the volatile Iraqi-Syrian border. One soldier was killed and another wounded, police said.            

Police also found evidence of execution-style killings. They retrieved the corpses of eight men, blindfolded and handcuffed, in the mainly Sunni area of Arab Jubbor, south of Baghdad.         

To the northwest of the capital, five corpses were found in the mainly Shi'ite district of Shua'ala, also handcuffed and blindfolded and executed, police said.            

No groups immediately claimed responsibility for Wednesday's attacks.            

Nearly 1,000 people were killed across Iraq in October, according to United Nations figures. The violence, partly fuelled by the increasingly sectarian conflict in neighboring Syria, has reached levels not seen since 2006-2007, when tens of thousands of people died.            

In the mainly Shi'ite district of Hurriya, northwest of Baghdad, gunmen killed a Sunni Muslim family of five.           

In Bayaa, another mainly Shi'ite district south of the  capital, gunmen using weapons equipped with silencers killed one person and wounded three at a bus terminal.  
         
A roadside bomb killed two people and wounded four in the mainly Sunni district of Doura, south of Baghdad. A similar device killed one person and wounded another in the mainly Shi'ite Talbiya district, north of the capital.            

The United Nations has called on Iraq's feuding political leaders to cooperate to end the bloodshed, which has escalated since U.S. troops withdrew in December 2011. The government has blamed rising violence on Sunni Islamist militant groups, including al Qaeda.             


REUTERS