MOSUL, Iraq, (PNA/Xinhua) — At least 11 killed and over 60 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.
“Our reports said that 11 killed, including the school principal and a policeman, while more than 60 wounded and most of them were school children, 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.
One of the blasts occurred when a suicide bomber blew up a truck loaded with explosives near a primary school in a majority- Shiite village outside the city of Tal Afar, about 400 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, Abbasi said.
The explosion damaged part of the school building, and Iraqi security forces and rescue teams rushed to the scenes and started to remove the debris of building looking for victims, Abbasi said.
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.
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.