Insurgents slaughter 40 Iraqis in day of bombs
IRAQ: Bombs exploded across central Iraq on Monday, adding 40
more bloodied corpses to the grim toll of Iraqi dead as rebel groups
mounted a vicious challenge to the latest US and Iraqi security plan.
The attacks will in the main be blamed on Sunni insurgents and appear
to have been timed to embarrass US and Iraqi commanders as they deploy
tens of thousands of troops to try to quell Baghdad’s vicious sectarian
war.
Five American soldiers were also killed, including two in what the US
military dubbed a “coordinated attack on a coalition force combat
outpost” in Tarmiyah, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) north of the
capital.
Seventeen were also wounded when “insurgents initiated the attack on
the outpost with a suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device
detonation,” a US statement said.
The deaths brought to 3,133 the number of US servicemen and women who
have died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to Pentagon
figures.
Early Monday, five Iraqi commuters were killed by a bomb that gutted
a bus in the mixed but largely Shiite district of Karrada, one day after
a double car bombing ripped through a crowd in a city market and killed
more than 60 people.
In a second attack, a roadside bomb exploded in the path of a police
patrol in nearby Zafaraniyah. It killed three police and three civilians
and wounded 40 bystanders, according to a security official.
As dusk fell, a barrage of mortars slammed into a Shiite district on
the southern edge of Baghdad and killed another 11 people, mainly women
and children, and wounded 14, an Iraqi defence official said.
North of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber attacked a house in the
Khazraj district belonging to an Iraqi army officer, Major Amer Nayif,
killing five soldiers and wounding 10, police said.
In Ramadi, two suicide car bombers attacked a house belonging to
Sheikh Abdulsattar Abu Risha, the head of a council of Sunni tribal
chiefs which opposes Al-Qaeda in western Iraq, his deputy Sheikh Hamid
al-Hais said.
Baghdad, Tuesday, AFP |
