SUICIDE BOMBERS LAUNCHED attacks across Iraq today which included bombs being detonated at a primary school as violence reaches levels not seen in a number of years.

The bombers targeted Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad and a primary school and police station in a Shiite village in north Iraq on Sunday, killing at least 24 people, officials said.

The violence is at a level unseen since 2008, amid persistent fears of a relapse into the kind of intense Sunni-Shiite bloodshed that peaked in 2006-2007 and killed tens of thousands of people.

A suicide bomber detonated explosives near pilgrims walking to a shrine in north Baghdad to commemorate the death of Imam Mohammed al-Jawad, the ninth Shiite imam. The blast killed at least nine people and wounded 30 others, officials said.

A bus parked near the site of the explosion had a streak of blood running from a shattered window down its side. Pieces of human flesh hung from a roadside tree, and blood was spattered on a pavement and the underside of a bridge.

Two young boys sifted through debris at the site, where items including sandals and a policeman’s belt buckle lay in a pool of water formed when emergency personnel hosed the street down.

“We are not afraid of the explosion, we are not afraid of death,” said Hussein Haidar, a pilgrim walking to the shrine after the attack.

Even after the blast, security forces performed only cursory searches of people entering the area.

Two more suicide bombers today targeted the Turkmen Shiite village of Qabak in Nineveh province about 50km from the border with Syria.

10 schoolchildren killed

(An Iraqi man stands next to his injured son at a hospital following the school attack. Pic: AP Photo)

The bombers detonated explosives-rigged vehicles at a police station and a primary school, killing 15 people and wounding 44, local official Abdulal Abbas told AFP.

Ten children and five police were killed, Abbas said, adding that the school bombing collapsed the building’s roof.

Sunday is a normal schoolday in Iraq, where the weekend is on Friday and Saturday.

“Al-Qaeda terrorists… carried out the crime because we are Shiites,” a weeping mother whose young son was wounded in Qabak said at a hospital in Dohuk province.

A bomb also exploded in east Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least five people and wounding 14, while two blasts in the northern province of Kirkuk killed a Kurdish security forces member and wounded another.

© – AFP