Two Churches Bombed in Mosul

Deputy provincial governor Khasro Gouran said one blast struck a church about 2:30 p.m. in eastern Mosul’s Wihda neighborhood, wounding three people.

An hour later, gunmen stormed a church in western Mosul, ordering a handful of people outside before bombing it, Gouran said. There were no casualties.

The religious denominations of the churches were not immediately clear.

Islamic militants have regularly targeted different sectors of Iraq’s multiethnic population, including the minority Christians, in a bid to disrupt the U.S.-led reconstruction of the war-scarred country.

In August, four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul were blown up in a coordinated series of car bombings, killing at least seven people and wounding dozens more in the first significant strike against Iraq’s minority Christians since the U.S. invasion began last year.

One person was killed and 11 injured in the August bombing in Mosul, where a minority Christian community has for long lived in harmony with the city’s Sunni Arab majority, and many say they still do. Any hostility toward Christians was mostly kept in check under the toppled dictator, Saddam Hussein, who didn’t allow militant Islamists to gain clout.