A women wearing a suicide vest blew herself up near a popular market and a Shiite mosque in Diyala province north of the capital Wednesday, killing eight civilians and injuring seven others, police said. The attack took place in Khan Bani Saad, a town nine miles south of Baqouba, Diyala's provincial capital.
Meanwhile, after several months of relative quiet in Baghdad, fighters have resumed mortar and rocket attacks, with several big explosions heard shortly after dawn on Wednesday as well as a few more later in the morning. On Tuesday night, at least five mortars crashed into the fortified Green Zone, not long after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a news conference after making an unannounced visit.
Meanwhile, Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish targets in northern Iraq on Tuesday in the latest in a series of cross-border air strikes, Turkey's military and northern Iraqi security forces said. "Intensive" strikes targeted Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) positions in the regions of Zap-Sivi, Avasin-Basyan and Hakurk, the Turkish army general staff announced in a statement on its website.
"The aircraft returned safely to base after successfully completing their mission," it said, adding that "maximum care" was taken to avoid civilian casualties.
General Jabbar Yawar, spokesman for the Kurdish peshmerga security forces of northern Iraq, said the air strikes had been preceded by an artillery barrage. "The Turkish artillery bombarded the areas of Khakurg and Nirikan near Amadiyah," some 450 kilometres north of Baghdad, Yawar told AFP in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil.
