Bomb Kills Two Iraqi Police Officers
BAGHDAD, Iraq – A roadside bomb killed a local police chief and another officer in Baghdad on Tuesday, hospital and police officials said, in the latest insurgent attack on Iraq’s battered police forces.
Associated Press Television News footage from western Baghdad’s al-Washash district showed a destroyed white police pickup truck, its doors smashed and blood splattered across the driver’s seat.
Police, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified one of the dead as Col. Mouyad Mohammed Bashar, who was chief of al-Mamoun police station.
A third police officer was wounded in the blast, said Zayed Mohammed, a doctor at al-Yarmouk hospital. At the hospital, a bloodied policeman lay on a bed, bandages wrapped around his stomach and leg.
Police in Iraq have repeatedly been targeted by insurgents pressing a campaign to destabilize the interim government. The guerrillas see police as collaborators with the 160,000 mostly American coalition forces deployed here struggling to restore order.
From April 2003 to May 2004 alone, 710 Iraqi police were killed out of a total force of 130,000 officers, authorities said. A truck bomb last Wednesday targeted a police recruiting center in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, where hundreds of job applicants were gathered. It killed 70 people.
In the holy city of Najaf, U.S. forces fought Monday with gunmen protecting radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s house in clashes that killed one woman and wounded three people. The U.S. military had no immediate comment.
At least six U.S. military vehicles entered the Zahra area in Najaf near al-Sadr’s house, which is protected by his militia, the Mahdi Army, witnesses said.
Barrages of gunfire and mortar rounds set cars on fire before Iraqi police intervened and the U.S. forces withdrew, witnesses said.
“One woman was killed and we have three injured,” said Ajwak Kadhim, director at Al-Hakim Hospital in Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad.
Ali al-Yassiry, a Baghdad spokesman for al-Sadr, said U.S. troops briefly surrounded al-Sadr’s house in Najaf but then withdrew from the city. He said the fighting ended and the Mahdi Army was patrolling the area.
Al-Sadr, who is wanted by U.S. forces for the April 2003 murder of a moderate cleric in Najaf, was in his house at the time, witnesses said.
The radical cleric, who has grassroots support for his anti-coalition stance, began a two-month rebellion in early April after the U.S.-led occupation authority closed his newspaper and arrested a key aide. A series of truces ended the fighting, and the issue of whether to carry out his the arrest warrant was postponed.
On Tuesday, a U.S. Marine with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action west of the Iraqi capital on Tuesday, the military said.
The Marine died of wounds suffered in Anbar province, a volatile, Sunni-dominated region west of Baghdad that includes Fallujah, Ramadi and Qaim on the Syrian border.
The Marine died conducting “security and stability operations,” the U.S. command said. His name was withheld pending notification of kin.
The Marine’s killing brought to at least 913 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq.