Wave of bombings kills 9 in Iraq

More than a dozen bombs exploded in Iraq on Sunday, killing at least nine people and wounding more than 70 others, officials said, as the death toll for 2013 nears 5,000. Ten car bombs and three roadside bombs hit eight different areas of Iraq, seven of them south of Baghdad. In the deadliest single attack, a car bomb exploded near a bus station in the city of Kut, killing four people and wounding 15, police and medical personnel said. The attacks came a day after violence including a car bomb targeting shoppers in Samarra, north of Baghdad, killed a total of 16 people. One of the bombings on Sunday targeted mourners who were on their way to bury a person killed in the Samarra bombing the day before. The Sunday blast killed one person and wounded two, police and a doctor said. Violence in the country has reached a level not seen since 2008, when Iraq was just emerging from a brutal sectarian conflict. Diplomats and analysts say the Shiite-led government's failure to address the grievances of the Sunni Arab minority -- which complains of political exclusion and abuses by security forces -- has driven the rise in unrest. This year's spike in violence, including a number of sectarian attacks, has raised fears of a relapse into the kind of intense Sunni-Shiite bloodshed that peaked in 2006-2007 and killed tens of thousands of people. With the latest violence, more than 280 people have been killed this month, and over 4,950 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.