Shootings and bombings in Iraq killed at least 15 people Thursday, officials said, as the country struggles with rampant violence ahead of parliamentary elections at the end of the month. The country is suffering from a protracted surge in bloodshed that has killed more than 2,500 people this year and sparked fears Iraq is slipping back into the all-out sectarian fighting of 2006-2007. The unrest has been driven principally by complaints among the Sunni Arab minority of mistreatment by the Shiite-led government and security forces, and by the civil war in neighbouring Syria. In Thursday’s deadliest single incident, gunmen opened fire on a group of young Shiite men in Khales, north of Baghdad, and killed five of them, a police colonel and a doctor said. Fundamentalist Sunni militants frequently target members of Iraq’s Shiite majority, whom they consider apostates. In a […]