Wave of deadly bomb blasts hits Iraq

At least 24 people were killed and another 60 injured in 10 blasts across Iraq, including a car bomb outside a French consular building in the usually stable city of Nassiriya, police sources said. The most serious attack happened early on Sunday in Dujail, 50km north of Baghdad, when gunmen and a suicide bomber driving a car attacked a military base, killing 11 soldiers and injuring seven. One car bomb exploded outside the French consular building in Nassiriya, 300km south of Baghdad, wounding two people, police said. Another car bomb also detonated in the city, killing two and wounding three. An Iraqi police general said a bombing near the restive northern city of Kirkuk killed seven police recruits and wounded 17 as they were lining up to apply for jobs. Kirkuk police commander General Sarhad Qadir said the recruits had gathered in a parking lot on Sunday morning outside a military base about 10km outside the city. He said the recruits were applying for jobs as police with the state-run Northern Oil Co. Al-Qaeda links Kirkuk has been an Iraq flashpoint for years. Iraqi Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen all claim to a stake to its oil-rich land. More people were killed in several other blasts across the country in the towns of Samarra, Basra and Tuz Khurmato. Journalist Ahmed Rushdi, reporting from Baghdad, told Al Jazeera that according to him it was not only al-Qaeda that was behind the attacks. "It is also the insurgency against the government and the political parties, because there is a major political dispute between al Maliki and his opponents,” Rushdi said. "It is another day in the major failure of the security forces in Iraq. The people here are asking themselves; what is the government doing to regain control of the situation? There seems to be no real intelligence data concerning these attacks." The government, riven by infighting among Sunni, Shia and Kurdish political factions, is struggling to battle several armed groups, including an al-Qaeda affiliate, nine months after the last US troops left. Iraq's local al-Qaeda wing, Islamic State of Iraq, has claimed responsibility for other major attacks on security forces and Shia neighbourhoods. But former members of Saddam Hussein's outlawed Baathist party and other Sunni Islamist groups are also fighting the government. Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for Sunday's attacks. Tension in Iraq's delicate power-sharing government, and a resurgence of the al-Qaeda group, have raised fears of a return to widespread violence, especially as Iraq struggles to contain spillover from the growing conflict in neighbouring Syria.