A suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the playground of a primary school in northern Iraq and blew himself up, killing 14 children and their headmaster yesterday, police and medical sources said.

Another suicide bomber attacked a group of Shi’ite pilgrims on their way to visit a shrine in Baghdad, killing at least 14 people and wounding more than 30, some of them critically, police said.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for either bombing, but the tactics used point to the Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda, which views Shi’ites as non-believers and has been regaining momentum this year.

“Pools of blood, shoes and flesh are covering the ground,” said a policeman at the scene of the blast in Baghdad, which came on the anniversary of the death of a Shi’ite imam. Women and children were among the victims, the policeman said.

The attack at the primary school followed a suicide bombing minutes earlier on a police station in the same town, Tel Afar, about 70 kilometres northwest of Mosul city, where Sunni Islamist and other insurgents have a foothold. There were no casualties in the police station attack.

The majority of Tel Afar’s residents are from Iraq’s Shi’ite Turkman minority, which in recent years has been the target of killings and kidnappings.

“The fingerprints of al-Qaeda are clear on both attacks,” said an official in the town who declined to be named.

Over 30 wounded, 29 killed

Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate was forced underground in 2007 after a joint offensive by US troops and Sunni tribesmen. But the group has re-emerged this year, invigorated by growing resentment towards Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government, which the country’s Sunni minority accuses of marginalising their minority sect.

Sunnis launched street protests in December after Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sought the arrest of a senior Sunni politician. A bloody raid by security forces on a protest camp in April touched off a violent backlash by militants.