Bomb kills 20 in Iraq after bloodiest month for US

By Atef Hassan

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) – A car bomb killed 20 people in
Iraq’s second city of Basra on Monday at the end of the
bloodiest month for U.S. troops in Iraq since early this year.

Witnesses said a suicide bomber targeted Iraqi troops.

Seven U.S. troops were killed by bombs near Baghdad, the
military said on Monday, taking October’s death toll to 93, the
highest in one month since January, when 107 died. The number
of Americans killed in Iraq passed the 2,000 mark a week ago.

The blast came when Basra’s bustling Algiers Street area
was packed with festive crowds visiting restaurants and
enjoying the cool of one of the last evenings of the holy month
of Ramadan.

An Interior Ministry official said 20 people were killed
and 45 wounded. Several buildings and vehicles were devastated
and rescue workers picked body parts from the street.

“An old car drove at an Iraqi army patrol and exploded,”
one eyewitness, named Ahmed, said. “Many people were killed.”

Deep in the majority Shi’ite heartland, the Gulf coast city
has been spared much of the violence Sunni Arab insurgents have
inflicted further north. There has been tension among rival
Shi’ite militias, however, and 16 people were killed by an
evening car bomb in September.

In the far west, where U.S. marines have been fighting for
months to stem a flow of foreign Arab fighters and funds coming
through Syria, local doctors and tribal leaders accused
American forces of killing some 40 civilians in an air strike.

The military said it knew of no civilian deaths and
believed it had killed an al Qaeda leader targeted by precision
bombing.

Two roadside bombings near Baghdad on Monday killed six
soldiers and the military announced a Marine had been killed by
a similar device near Falluja on Sunday.

WORST MONTH

That made October, which saw Iraqis vote for a constitution
and put Saddam Hussein on trial, the worst month for U.S.
forces since January, when attacks by Sunni Arab rebels surged
before an election that brought Kurds and majority Shi’ites to
power.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned at the weekend of
a similar increase in bloodshed before another parliamentary
vote in December, although officials hope a decision by Sunni
leaders not to repeat their January boycott of the poll may
deprive the militants of support within Saddam’s once dominant
minority.

President George W. Bush, responding to concern over the
rising U.S. death toll and declining support for the Iraq
campaign, said last week more sacrifices would be necessary.

Militants claiming to speak for some nationalist rebels
have said they held fire around the October 15 constitutional
referendum to encourage a big Sunni turnout and may do so
again, despite disappointment that Sunnis narrowly failed to
veto the charter.

But foreign-influenced Islamist radicals like al Qaeda show
no sign of letting up. A suicide bomber lured Shi’ites to their
death with a truck laden with dates on Saturday, killing 30 in
a small town north of Baghdad, and there are fears of more
violence around this week’s end of the holy month of Ramadan.

Launching one of two big Sunni-led blocs expected to figure
prominently among dozens of parties on the December 15 ballot,
one leader set the tone for his campaign by calling for an end
to U.S. occupation. He criticised rivals who returned from
exile after Saddam’s fall as beholden to Washington or
religion.

“We are … working for the liberation of our country,”
Saleh al-Mutlak said, launching his Iraqi Unified Front as a
secular pan-Iraqi bloc. “You won’t find anyone in our group who
rode into Iraq on an American tank or on a sectarian horse.”

Various secular groups accuse the ruling United Alliance,
led by Islamists once exiled in Tehran, of seeking to bring
Iraq under the influence of fellow Shi’ites in non-Arab Iran.

LETHAL BOMBS

The order in which parties appear on the lengthy ballot
paper will be drawn by lot on Tuesday. Prime Minister Ibrahim
Jaafari said that, unlike in January, up to a million Iraqis
living abroad may not be able to vote due to the cost and a
tight schedule.

Monday’s roadside bomb that killed four soldiers near
Yusufiya, just south of Baghdad, was among the most lethal of
recent weeks. U.S. commanders have been voicing concern about
increasing power and sophistication of such bombs.

Devices capable of penetrating armoured vehicles have
become more common this year, based on technology U.S. and
British officials say has been introduced from Iran.

“We see an adversary that … continues to develop some
sophistication on very deadly and increasingly precise
standoff-type weapons,” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita
said.

Two soldiers were killed in a similar attack near Balad, 60
km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, and the military said a marine
was killed by a bomb near Falluja, to the west, on Sunday.

The U.S. death toll in Iraq is now at least 2,026.

Near the Syrian border on Monday, U.S. aircraft bombed a
house close to Karabila before dawn in what the military said
was a precision strike on an al Qaeda leader.

Hospital doctors in nearby Qaim said 40 people were killed
and 20 wounded, many of them women and children.

“Civilian deaths cannot be verified and hospital officials
frequently make such claims,” U.S. spokesman Colonel David
Lapan said. “We believe the targeted terrorist leader was
killed.”

(Additional reporting by Ammar al-Alwani in Ramadi and
Ahmed Rashid, Hiba Moussa and Claudia Parsons in Baghdad)