Two suicide bombers detonated explosives-rigged vehicles at a police station and a nearby primary school in northern Iraq today, killing 15 people including children, a local official said.
Violence has reached a level unseen since 2008, and there are persistent fears that Iraq will relapse into the kind of intense Sunni-Shiite bloodshed that peaked in 2006-2007 and killed tens of thousands of people.
The blasts in the Turkmen Shiite village of Qabat, near the Syrian border, also wounded 44 people, Abdulal Abbas told AFP.
The dead were five police and 10 children, Abbas said, adding that the bombing at the school collapsed the roof of the building.
The blasts came a day after violence including an attack on Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad and a suicide bombing at a cafe north of the capital killed at least 73 people.
In Iraq, almost nothing is safe from attack by militants, who have struck highly-secured targets such as prisons, and also bombed cafes, markets, mosques, football fields, weddings and funerals.
Two journalists from the Sharqiya television channel were also gunned down in the northern city of Mosul yesterday.
Iraq has come in for repeated criticism over shortcomings in media freedoms.
"Many Iraqi journalists are routinely exposed to threats, murder attempts, attacks, difficulties obtaining permission, denial of access, confiscation of equipment and so on," media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said earlier this year.
Diplomats and analysts say the Shiite-led government's failure to address the grievances of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority -- which complains of political exclusion and abuses by security forces -- has driven the spike in unrest.
