Suicide bomber truck kills 55 in Iraq
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide bomber in a fuel truck killed 55 people in a town south of Baghdad on Sunday, the latest in a series of spectacular guerrilla attacks to rattle Iraq.
The bomb, which police said exploded near a Shi'ite mosque and market, also wounded 82 people. It followed several attacks which killed at least 16 people, including three British soldiers, on Saturday.
The frenzy of suicide attacks suggests the government still has a long way to go before stamping out such attacks, which officials say is the biggest security threat to Iraq.
A suicide bomber in a car hit the Doura district in south Baghdad, killing three civilians and two policemen, a police source said.
Violence also erupted near the northern city of Mosul. A suicide bomber strapped with explosives attacked a police station, killing four policemen, police said.
Ten militants blew themselves up across Baghdad on Friday and another attacked Iskindiriya, south of the capital, killing at least 32 people, police said.
In Amara in southeast Iraq, three British soldiers died in what the Ministry of Defense in London said was a suspected roadside bomb. It said the deaths brought to 92 the number of British soldiers who have died in Iraq, including 53 killed in action.
A little-known Iraqi insurgent group said in a Web statement that it was behind the killing of the British soldiers in southern Iraq on Saturday.
"Thank God, this morning ... three British soldiers were killed and at least three others were injured by exploding a package by their patrol in the Maysan province," the group, calling itself the Imam Hussein Brigades, said.
The statement was posted on a site used by the main Iraqi insurgent groups, including the al Qaeda group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The name suggested it was a Shi'ite group.
The group said it also killed an Iraqi judge in the town of Nassiriya.
Sunni Arab insurgents are leading a campaign of suicide bombings, assassinations and kidnappings in a bid to topple Iraq's Shi'ite-led government backed by the United States.
In Baghdad, tense officers manned extra police checkpoints throughout the capital, Reuters journalists and drivers reported, after the series of blasts on Friday Al Qaeda described as an offensive to seize control of the city.
SUICIDE ATTACKS CHALLENGE GOVERNMENT
Suicide bombers have consistently undermined government promises that January elections would pacify the country, where violence has raised fears Iraq could slide toward civil war.
Militants, driving cars and blending in with the population, can strike without detection by security forces, who themselves have lost hundreds of comrades in the attacks.
Al Qaeda's Iraq wing, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, boasted that the attacks had given it control of the capital, but there was no sign of militants in the streets.
"Through the day and the night, Baghdad rang with the music of the mujahideen's bullets and the prayers of the martyrs," it said in an Internet statement.
"Our mujahideen now control the streets," it said. "Our sheikh Abu Musab has urged us to intensify our attacks until America is defeated ... and we will continue in our jihad."
Friday's suicide car bombs followed a thwarted triple suicide attack at a gate to Baghdad's fortified Green Zone government compound on Thursday. A suicide car bomb on Wednesday near a U.S. patrol killed 27 people, mostly Iraqi children.
Suicide bombs, orchestrated by groups of mainly foreigners like Zarqawi's, have increased sharply since the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led government took power in April.
U.S. generals have said the situation is improving. But Friday's 10 bombs in a day in Baghdad compares with just six countrywide for the entire previous week, a figure a U.S. spokesman had said was the lowest in 11 weeks.
In Samarra, in the central Sunni heartland, locals reported that U.S. troops and Iraqi police had imposed a curfew, ordering residents to stay in their homes after two civilians were killed by gunmen outside a U.S. base.
On the diplomatic front, Iraqi's Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari arrived in Iran for the first visit in decades by a leader of Iraq to its Shi'ite neighbor and former foe.
Jaafari's trip is seen as a historic opportunity to mend ties with a country that Iraq fought for eight years under Saddam. But too quick a rapprochement risks alienating both the United States and Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who are suspicious of Jaafari's Shi'ite-led government's ties to Shi'ite Iran.
I would ask the media why a Shi'ite-majority Iraqi government is a bad thing when the majority of the Iraqi people are Shi'ite, but then I remember these are the same people who feel Democrats have a divine right to power no matter what their minority status.