DHAKA: Suicide car bombers attacked an elementary school and a police station in a small northern Iraqi village on Sunday, while another on foot detonated his payload among Shia pilgrims in Baghdad, killing at least 27 people including children.

Iraq officials said, reports The Straits Times.

The attacks are the latest in a relentless wave of killing that is raising fears that Iraq is falling back into the spiral of violence that brought it to the edge of civil war in the years after the 2003 United States-led invasion.

Sunday’s blasts began around 930am in the Shia Turkomen village of Qabak, just outside the town of Tal Afar.

The area around the stricken village has long been a hotbed for hard-to-rout Sunni insurgents and a corridor for extremist fighters arriving from nearby Syria.

One car bomb in the tiny village targeted an elementary school while children ages 6 to 12 were in class, as another struck a nearby police station, Tal Afar Mayor Abdul Aal al-Obeidi said.

The dead included 12 children, the school principal and two policemen.

Another 90 people were wounded, he said.

The village is home to only about 200 residents, and part of the single-storey school collapsed as a result of the blast, he said. Tal Afar is 420km north-west of Baghdad.

BDST: 1932 HRS, OCT 06, 2013
RoR/JCK