Car bombs, shooting in Iraq leave 15 dead

Four car bombs killed over a dozen people in sprawling Shiite neighbourhoods of the Iraqi capital and in a northern city this morning, while gunmen cut down the brother of a Sunni lawmaker, officials said.
Baghdad police said the first blast struck a bus and taxi stop around rush hour in the eastern Sadr City neighbourhood.
Nine people were killed, including a 7-year old child, and 16 were wounded, two officers said.
Another car bomb hit a small market at a taxi stop in the eastern suburb of Kamaliya, killing three civilians and wounding 14 others, they said.
In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide attacker rammed his car into an army check point, killing two soldiers and wounding three others, another police officer said.

The attack came just after a car bomb wounded two civilians, he said.

Mosul is located 360 kilometres northwest of Baghdad.
In Baghdad's southwestern neighbourhood of Baiyaa, drive-by shooters shot and killed a brother of a Sunni lawmaker and wounded two of his guards, two other police officers said.
Four medical officials in a nearby hospital confirmed the causality figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to brief reporters.
The attack followed a wave of bombings yesterday that struck in mainly in Shiite neighbourhoods, killing 33 people.
At least seven of them died in Sadr City when a bomb in a parked car detonated at a bus stop.

The spike in violence comes amid growing tensions between the Shiite-led government and Iraq's Sunni minority over what they consider second-class treatment. A bloody government crackdown on militants last month in a protest camp in the country's north fuelled the tension.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for yesterday's and today's attacks, but car and suicide bombings are a hallmark of al-Qaeda's Iraq branch.
The spike in attacks, after a general decrease in violence, has raised fears of a return to the sectarian bloodshed that pushed the country to the brink of civil war in 2006-2007.