New Bomb attacks kill 40 in Iraq
Pastor Dale Morgan
New Bomb attacks kill 40 in Iraq*
Reuters
By Adrian Croft and Dean Yates
BAGHDAD - Bombs killed nearly 40 people in Iraq on Thursday, including
20 at a tribal council meeting in Anbar province just days before the
U.S. military transfers control of security for the vast western region
to Iraqi forces.
The U.S. military said there were American troop casualties in the
attack in Anbar but gave no details.
In the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb on a crowded street killed 18
people and wounded 80 near the office of the governor of surrounding
Nineveh province, U.S. forces said.
Nineveh Governor Duraid Kashmula had just left his office to investigate
damage caused by two rocket-propelled grenades when the car bomb went
off. The governor was unhurt. Officials said the bomb may have been an
assassination attempt.
Dramatic television pictures showed the bomb exploding near an old woman
on the side of a street. A hail of gunfire burst out as security guards
opened fire.
Violence in Iraq fell to a four-year low last month, but there has been
a spate of attacks in the past week, especially in and around Mosul,
which the U.S. military has called Sunni Islamist al Qaeda's last major
urban stronghold in Iraq.
The attacks suggest al Qaeda, significantly weakened after a wave of
U.S. offensives in the past year, is not a spent force. A U.S. military
spokesman said the Mosul attack fitted a pattern of al Qaeda attacking
Iraqis and Iraqi security forces.
The American military said al Qaeda was likely behind the suicide
bombing against U.S.-backed Sunni Arab tribal leaders in the Anbar town
of Garma, 30 km northwest of Baghdad.
A police spokesman in the nearby city of Falluja said 20 people had been
killed and 12 wounded.
A tribal leader, Mizher Mshawih, and the head of the district council,
Kamal Abdul-Salam, were among those killed, he said, as well as three
policemen.
Anbar was once the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency against U.S.
forces and an al Qaeda haven.
In late 2006, Sunni Arab tribal leaders, sick of al Qaeda's
indiscriminate killing of civilians and harsh interpretation of Islam,
joined with the U.S. military to expel the group. Many al Qaeda fighters
fled north, to provinces such as Nineveh.
Violence in Anbar has fallen so sharply that the province is scheduled
to become the first Sunni Arab province to be transferred to Iraqi
security control on Saturday.
It will be the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces to revert to Iraqi control.
The previous nine have been Kurdish or Shi'ite.
ANBAR HANDOVER CEREMONY STILL ON
A U.S. military source in Anbar who declined to be identified said there
were no immediate plans to postpone the handover date in response to the
bombing.
"We still have people planning for the event. Obviously our senior
commanders are always assessing, but as of right now, there is no
change," he said.
The suicide bomber managed to get into a meeting between tribal leaders
and Abdul-Salam, the district council chief. The meeting was being held
in the local council building.
Defence Ministry spokesman Major-General Mohammed al-Askari blamed al
Qaeda for the surge of attacks in Mosul.
"These are sleeper cells that seize any opportunity ... There will be
quick measures to end these attacks," Askari said, without elaborating.
Iraqi security forces stepped up a crackdown against al Qaeda last month
in Mosul, Iraq's third largest city.
Militants have increasingly targeted Iraqi councils.
On Tuesday, a bomb killed 10 people, including two U.S. government
employees and two U.S. soldiers, at a council meeting in the Baghdad
stronghold of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
On Monday, a gunman killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded three as they
left a council meeting southeast of Baghdad.
U.S. forces said an American soldier was killed in eastern Baghdad on
Wednesday by an armour-piercing roadside bomb.
It brought to eight the number of American troops killed in Iraq this
week and the number killed in June to 26.
That is up from 19 American soldiers killed in May, the lowest monthly
total since the 2003 invasion. More than 4,100 U.S. troops have been
killed in Iraq.
(Additional reporting by Fadhel al-Badrani in Falluja, Tim Cocks, Ahmed
Rasheed and Khalid al-Ansary in Baghdad; Writing by Dean Yates and
Adrian Croft; Editing by Giles Elgood)