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Iraq bombs kill police, British troops

Posted on: Saturday, 16 July 2005, 06:43 CDT

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.

Source: REUTERS

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