Iraqi Minister Vows Action After Bombings

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s defense minister promised a “house-to-house” search for suspects who planned a suicide car bombing near a recruitment center in Baghdad that killed at least 35 Iraqis hoping to join the military.

U.S. forces clashed with insurgents for a second day northeast of Baghdad on Friday, a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity.

A U.S. Army 1st Infantry patrol came under fire at about 7:45 a.m. in the town of Buhriz, near Baqouba, 35 miles north of Baghdad, and troops returned fire, the official said.

Baqouba, a largely Sunni Muslim area that has formed a core of support for Saddam Hussein’s former regime, has been the scene of frequent skirmishes between coalition forces and insurgents.

Defense Minister Hazem al-Shalan promised tough action against those behind the Thursday attacks.

“We will cut off the hands of those people, we will slit their throats if it is necessary to do so,” he told reporters. “For those people who want to join the new Iraqi army, we will protect them and we will find them a safe location so they can submit their applications.”

Asked if the new government would impose martial law if security continues to deteriorate, interim Interior Minister Falah Hassan al-Naqib said: “If we need to do it, yes, we’ll do it, we won’t hesitate. This is the security of our country … the security and the life of our people.”

A decision to impose martial law would be up to the prime minister, al-Shalan said.

The explosion near the recruitment center in Baghdad scattered bodies, blood and debris across a four-lane highway.

A white sport-utility vehicle packed with artillery shells exploded near a gate of a sprawling Iraqi security compound. The base is close to the Muthanna airport on the western side of the Tigris River. The attack was the deadliest single blast since a car bombing at the same base in February.

Most of the victims were poor Iraqis desperate to take dangerous jobs in the Iraqi security forces because of a lack of alternatives in a country with up to 45 percent unemployment. They took their chances at the recruitment center even after the February bombing there killed 47 people.

“I have been coming for three weeks and they decided to interview us today,” Abdul Wahid Shadhan, 32, said as he lay in a hospital bed coughing up blood. “I heard a big explosion, I lost sight of everything and then I found myself in the hospital.”

Shadhan said he had been out of work since the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army last year. “I was obliged to work as a porter to feed my seven children,” he told The Associated Press.

U.S. Col. Mike Murray said 175 recruits inside the walled compound also escaped injury but many of the victims had just gotten off a bus at about 9 a.m.

“We were standing waiting for our turn to register,” Rafid Mudhar told the AP from his hospital bed. “All of a sudden, we heard a big explosion, and most of those standing fell on the ground, including me.”

The other car bomb exploded Thursday afternoon in a village near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, killed six Iraqi Civil Defense Corps members and wounding four others, the U.S. military said. The defense corps is the main internal security force, created by U.S. administrators to battle insurgents.

That bombing came a day after a rocket slammed into a U.S. logistics base near Balad, killing three U.S. soldiers and wounding 25 other people, including two civilians.

The attacks came amid a surge of violence targeting American troops and their Iraqi allies ahead of the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30. The bombings were apparently designed to shake confidence in Iraqi security forces, seen by some in the region as beholden to the Americans.

In Japan, the Cabinet on Friday approved a plan for Japanese troops, now in Iraq on a humanitarian mission, to stay and join a multinational force after Iraq’s interim government takes control.

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in Mosul for talks with the Iraqi leadership, promised that American troops would support the new government after the handover because “Iraqi security forces are not ready to assume their job.”

More than 300 people have been killed in attacks on police stations and recruitment centers since September. In the most lethal attacks, five suicide bombings near police stations and a police academy in Basra killed at least 68 and wounded 200.

Iraq’s interior minister, al-Naqib, linked Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to the Baghdad attack and accused foreigners of being behind the 20 car bombings that have shaken the country since the start of June. He offered no new evidence.

U.S. officials suggest that the accelerated pace indicates that al-Zarqawi’s network has shifted from complex, cataclysmic bombings to more frequent attacks against less protected targets.

Security at American and coalition facilities is formidable, with blast walls, earthen barricades and well targeted fields of fire. Many Iraqi facilities lack such measures.

The bombings have alarmed the people of Baghdad. Most are convinced that the attacks are carried out by outsiders – even by Americans who they say hope to weaken Islam and find a pretext to stay in this oil-rich country.