More than 1,000 killed in May

More than 1,000 people were killed in violence in Iraq in May, making it the deadliest month since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07, the United Nations reported yesterday, stoking fears of a return to civil war.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in the last two months as al-Qaeda and Sunni Islamist insurgents, invigorated by the Sunni-led revolt in Syria and by Sunni discontent at home, seek to revive the kind of all-out inter-communal conflict that killed tens of thousands five years ago.
"That is a sad record," Martin Kobler, the UN envoy in Baghdad, said in a statement.
This week multiple bombings battered Shia and Sunni areas of the capital Baghdad, killing nearly 100 people.