14 Killed In Violence Iraq, After More Than 1,000 Died In May And 700 In April

Fourteen people were murdered execution-style in Iraq on Wednesday. The travelers, mostly Shi'ite villagers from the central Karbala province along with a few soldiers, were seized by gunmen in the western Anbar province at a fake checkpoint, AP reported. All 14 were then lined up and shot. Anbar is majority Sunni Muslim.

If this doesn’t sound all that shocking, it’s possibly because these incidents are rather commonplace now in Iraq. In May, 40 Sunni Muslims were killed and 46 were wounded when a mosque was attacked in the eastern Diyala province, CNN reported. The same month, around 36 people were killed in and around Baghdad, including the brother of a Sunni member of Parliament who was shot near his house. Twenty-one people were killed in bombings the northern city of Kirkuk. In the town of al-Madaan, south of Baghdad, eight people were killed by a roadside bomb that went off during a funeral.

All in all, the U.N. reported that around 1,045 Iraqi civilians were killed in May all over the country in a combination of roadside bombs, suicide bombers, bomb attacks and shootings. And that was just in May. On April 15, 51 people were killed and 266 wounded in a wave of bombings across the country. The next day, three people were killed by a car bomb in Baghdad and one person was killed and five wounded just north of Baghdad. The U.N. said in total 712 people were killed in April.

While CNN reported this carnage still has not reached the level of the peak of attacks between 2005 and 2007, many fear that a resurgence of attacks is just around the corner as the toll continues to mount.

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