Violence Kills at Least 12 People in Iraq

Attacks in Iraq killed at least 12 people and wounded dozens more on Friday, security and medical officials said, in the latest wave of violence sweeping across the country.

A roadside bomb exploded in the morning in the main market in al-Husseiniyah, a Shiite-majority area on Baghdad's northeast outskirts, and another went off after emergency personnel arrived, an interior ministry official said.

A medical source at the Sheikh al-Dhari hospital said the facility had received eight bodies and more than 50 wounded from the blasts, while a health ministry source put the toll at 13 killed and about 150 wounded.

Meanwhile, gunmen with silenced weapons opened fire on a police checkpoint in Bayaa in south Baghdad, killing three policemen, the interior ministry official said. The toll was confirmed by the health ministry source.

And a suicide car bombing and mortar rounds killed one person and wounded 12 in Samarra, a Sunni-majority city north of Baghdad that houses the Shiite al-Askari shrine, which is visited by tens of thousands of pilgrims each year.

The shrine was bombed in February 2006, triggering a wave of sectarian bloodshed in which tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed.

The violence was brought under control only after Sunni tribes turned against the insurgents and the United States sent in thousands of additional soldiers in a troop "surge."

The suicide bomber targeted a police checkpoint at the southern entrance of Samarra, killing an Iranian pilgrim and wounding 10 other people.

Seven Iranian pilgrims, two police and a soldier were wounded, a police lieutenant colonel and a medical source from Samarra hospital said.

Two more Iranian pilgrims were wounded by two mortar rounds that exploded in the area, the same sources said.

With the latest violence, at least 160 people have died in attacks in Iraq mainly targeting the Shiite community in the past 10 days -- more than the number of people killed during the entire month of May, according to official figures.

On June 13, 72 people were killed in a string of attacks across the country that were later claimed by Al-Qaeda's front group, the Islamic State of Iraq.

They included a car bomb that killed seven on the outskirts of Kadhimiyah, the site of the shrine of revered Shiite imam Imam Musa Kadhim, and another blast in Karrada in central Baghdad amid Shiite pilgrims' food tents, killing 16.

Three days later, two car bombs targeting Shiites commemorating Imam Kadhim's death in 799 killed 32 people in the capital.

And on Monday, a suicide bomber killed 22 people in an attack on Shiite mourners in Baquba, north of Baghdad.

That attack came on the same day that Sami al-Massudi, the deputy head of the Shiite endowment which oversees Shiite religious sites in Iraq, said a roadside bomb hit his convoy in the Saidiyah area of south Baghdad, wounding three guards.

Along with the security forces, the Shiite majority has been a main target of Sunni Arab armed groups since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.

While violence in Iraq has declined dramatically since its peak in 2006-2007, attacks remain common. A total of 132 Iraqis were killed in violence in May, according to official figures.