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Five Iraq Police Die in Militant Strikes

Posted on: Sunday, 20 March 2005, 09:00 CST

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Insurgents targeted Iraqi security forces and government buildings with gunfire, suicide bomb attacks and mortar rounds Sunday, leaving at least five people dead - including a top anti-corruption official - as the conflict moved into its third year since the U.S.-led invasion.

In neighboring Jordan, a court convicted Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, for plotting to attack the Jordanian embassy here, sentencing him in absentia to 15 years imprisonment.

In Iraq's north, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a government compound in Mosul, killing himself and Walid Kashmoula, the head of the Iraqi police anti-corruption department, officials said. Three others were injured.

In Baghdad, residents said saboteurs blew up a municipal building in a western neighborhood, reducing the two-story building to rubble. No injuries were reported.

A Humvee was overturned on the highway to the airport. Witnesses said it was hit by a roadside bomb, but U.S. military officials were not immediately available to comment. U.S. troops sealed off the area.

Insurgents kept up their deadly campaign against Iraq's fledgling security force, which is struggling to build its ranks and fight the insurgency and lawlessness that has gripped the country in the two years since the U.S.-led, March 19, 2003, invasion.

Assailants leapt from their vehicle and unleashed gunfire on a policeman walking to work in Samarra, killing the man, said Maj. Sadoun Ahmed, a police official in the Sunni Triangle town 60 miles north of Baghdad.

Police who went to collect the man's body also came under attack, sparking a gunfight that left three police injured along with a trio of attackers, who were arrested, police Lt. Qassim Mohammed said.

In the southern city of Basra, attackers targeted a police patrol with a roadside bomb, killing one civilian and injuring a policeman, police Col. Karim al-Zeidi said.

Insurgents lobbed mortar fire into a neighborhood just outside the walls of an Iraqi army base in the town of Mahmoudiyah, south of Baghdad, killing one civilian and injuring two others, said Ikbal Sabir, an official at the Yarmouk Hospital where the bodies were taken.

The attacks followed a similar string of violence on Saturday, the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Militants killed five police officers as the insurgency pressed on with its tactic of targeting Iraqi security forces, Shiites and Kurds and focusing less on American troops.

Also in Mosul, authorities announced they broke up a five-member insurgent cell, arresting two Saudi Arabia citizens and seizing a weapons cache in a Friday raid by Iraqi army commandos.

The cell was planning assassinations of officials in the northern city, an Iraqi army officer said Sunday on condition of anonymity, citing fears of insurgent reprisals against himself and his family.

In Jordan, a military court sentenced al-Zarqawi to 15 years in jail and a detained associate to three years behind bars Sunday for planning an attack on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the offices of the Jordanian military attache in Baghdad, and unspecified American targets in Iraq.

The court was told that the two Jordanians met in Iraq in November 2003 to plan an attack on the embassy following an August bombing on the same building that killed 18 people. Al-Zarqawi has also been accused of carrying out the August bombing.

The United States has slapped a $25 million bounty on Al-Zarqawi, who has pledged loyalty to Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaida organization and is now considered the terror outfit's point man in Iraq.

The top U.S. general in Iraq, Army Gen. George Casey, said recently that the level of violence against U.S. troops had dropped significantly since the Jan. 30 elections.

That appeared to be the result of a tactical shift by insurgents - made up mostly of Sunni Arabs dominant under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein - to focus violence on majority Shiites and Kurds, two groups persecuted under Saddam's rule.

Around the world, tens of thousands of anti-war protesters marked the war's two-year anniversary with demonstrations. The largest turnout was among residents of America's closest ally in the war - Britain, where 45,000 marched to the U.S. Embassy.

In America, U.S. President George W. Bush saluted the more than 1,500 U.S. troops who have died in the conflict.

"I know that nothing can end the pain of the families who have lost loved ones in this struggle, but they can know that their sacrifice has added to America's security and the freedom of the world," Bush said in a weekly radio address.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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