AFP/Baghdad


Attacks mainly targeting Shia-majority areas of Iraq killed at least 57 people yesterday, and security forces killed 10 militants, officials said, as the interior ministry warned of civil war.
Iraq is witnessing its worst violence since 2008, when the country was emerging from a bloody sectarian conflict.
More than 800 people have now been killed this month, and over 3,000 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.
The violence has included sophisticated, highly co-ordinated attacks, such as assaults on two prisons that saw more than 500 inmates, including senior Al Qaeda members, escape.
Yesterday, 11 car bombs hit nine different areas of Baghdad, seven of them Shia-majority, while another exploded in Mahmudiyah south of the capital.
Two more car bombs exploded in Kut, while two hit Samawa and another detonated in Basra, all south of Baghdad.
Bombings elsewhere in Iraq killed six police, among them a lieutenant colonel and a captain, in addition to a soldier and two civilians.
The interior ministry warned of the consequences of the bloodshed.
Iraq is faced with “open war waged by the forces of bloody sectarianism aiming to plunge the country into chaos and reproduce civil war”, the ministry said in a statement.
Iraq was racked by a bloody Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict that peaked in 2006-2007, when thousands of people were killed because of their religious affiliation or forced to abandon their homes under threat of death.
The interior ministry also called for the “full support and co-operation of citizens with the security forces”.
Army and police forces, meanwhile, killed 10 militants west of Tikrit, police said.
They also destroyed the militants’ camp, carried out controlled detonations of three car bombs and seized explosives belts, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition and explosives, they said.
One of the Baghdad bombs exploded near where day labourers wait for work in the overwhelmingly Shia area of Sadr City, killing five people and wounding 17.
Debris, including what appeared to be the remains of the vehicle that held the explosives, covered the street around the site of the blast.
The explosion also badly damaged shops in the area, and the force of the blast smashed a white minibus, throwing it on its side.