Iraq bombs kill police, British troops

By Peter Graff

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Suicide bombers killed seven Iraqi
policemen on Saturday and three British soldiers died in a
roadside blast, piling pressure on the government a day after
militants blew themselves up across the capital.

The policemen, killed in Baghdad and near the northern city
of Mosul in separate attacks, were the latest victims of a
suicide bombing campaign posing a severe security threat to
Iraq.

Saturday’s blasts also wounded 28 policemen, police and
hospital sources said.

Friday’s death toll climbed to at least 32 with news that
an 11th suicide bombing in just one day had killed three
policemen and four civilians at a checkpoint south of Baghdad
in Iskindiriya at night.

The violence prompted Iraqi police to tighten their grip on
Baghdad but insurgents struck again in southeast Iraq, killing
three British soldiers with a roadside bomb.

Tense officers manned extra police checkpoints throughout
the capital, Reuters journalists and drivers reported, after a
series of blasts Al Qaeda described as an offensive to seize
control of the city.

The campaign of attacks from Friday morning until after
dark, struck U.S. and Iraqi military and police targets at all
points of the compass.

AL QAEDA CLAIMS SUCCESS

Police said at least 32 people were killed on Friday,
mostly Iraqi troops, and more than 118 wounded, even though
streets were mostly quiet for the Muslim week’s holy day.

Suicide bombings are the biggest security nightmare for the
government, which vowed to stabilize the country after January
elections empowered Shi’ites and Kurds for the first time and
sidelined Sunnis once dominant under Saddam Hussein.

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.”

In Amara in southeast Iraq, three British soldiers were
killed in what the Ministry of Defense in London said was a
suspected roadside bomb.

Friday’s 10 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 was due to arrive 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.