15 killed in 2 suicide car bombs in northern Iraq

Up to 15 people were killed and some 122 others wounded when two suicide car bombs went off at a village near the city of Tal Afar in Iraq's northern province of Nineveh on Sunday, a local official told Xinhua. "The reports said that a total of five policemen, school principal and nine school children were killed and 122 people were wounded in the two suicide car bombs near a school and a police station in the village of Qabat," Abdul- Aal al-Abbasi, an official in Tal Afar local government, told Xinhua by telephone. Most of the wounded were school children and many of them are in critical condition, Abbasi said. One of the blasts occurred when a suicide bomber blew up a truck loaded with explosives near a primary school in a predominantly Shiite Turkoman village outside the city of Tal Afar, about 430 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, Abbasi said. The explosion damaged part of the school building. The Iraqi security forces and rescue teams rushed to the scenes to remove the debris of building in search for victims, Abbasi added. Another car bomb went off near a police station in the same area, Abbasi said without giving further details. Ambulances, police and civilian vehicles are evacuating the victims to medical centers in nearby Tal Afar city, he added. The predominantly Sunni Nineveh province and its capital Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, has long been a stronghold for insurgent groups, including al-Qaida militants, since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in recent years, which raises fears that the country is sliding back to the full-blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000. The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq has said that almost 6,000 civilians were killed and over 14,000 others injured in Iraq from January to September this year.