42 killed, 63 wounded in Iraq violence

Up to 30 people were killed and about 40 wounded in a suicide bombing attack at a mosque in Mussaiyb town, 50 km south of the Iraqi capital Baghdad Sunday, police said.

A suicide bomber blew himself up before sunset at a funeral held at al-Hussien mosque in Mussaiyb, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, up to six people were killed in a series of explosions in the city of Arbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous region of Kurdistan Sunday, a Kurdish official said.

"The situation is under control of the security forces after they killed four terrorists and two suicide car bombers," Nozad Hadi, the governor of Arbil, told reporters without giving the number of casualties among civilians.

Two people were killed and eight wounded when a car bomb went off in Husseiniyah district in the northeastern part of Baghdad, an interior ministry source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

In a separate incident, a bomb attached to a civilian car detonated in Baghdad's southern district of Doura, seriously wounding the driver and destroying his car, the source said.

In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, gunmen shot dead two people in the volatile city of Maqdadiyah, some 100 km northeast of Baghdad, a provincial police source anonymously told Xinhua.

Meanwhile, gunmen shot dead a barber in front of his house in the western part of the provincial capital city of Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, while two people were wounded in a bomb explosion in a car in the western part of the city, the source said.

Separately, a government-backed Sahwa paramilitary group fighter was killed and three wounded when gunmen attacked their checkpoint in west of Baquba, the source added.

The Sahwa militia, also known as the Awakening Council or the Sons of Iraq, consists of armed groups, including some powerful anti-US Sunni insurgent groups, who turned their guns against the Al Qaeda network after the latter indiscriminately killed people of both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.

Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in recent years, which raises fears that the country is sliding back to the full-blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when the monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000.

The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq said earlier this month that almost 5,000 civilians were killed and 12,000 others injured in Iraq from January to August this year.u00a0