Powered by Max Banner Ads
Car bomb kills dozens in Baghdad
BAGHDAD: A car bomb exploded near a Shiite mosque in a busy commercial district on Tuesday in Baghdad, killing at least 61 people and wounding dozens more, the police said.
Gunfire erupted shortly after the blast, which a police officer said had gone off near the Khillani mosque in the commercial area of Sinak.
The police and hospital officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, gave the casualty toll as at least 61 people killed.
It was not the first time the Sinak area has been hit. A suicide car bomber killed at least 21 people there on May 28.
The attack on Tuesday was staged two days after the expiration of a curfew aimed at preventing retaliatory violence after the bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra last week.
Earlier, about 10,000 U.S. soldiers using heavily armored Stryker and Bradley fighting vehicles fought their way into an Al Qaeda sanctuary northeast of Baghdad. U.S. and Iraqi forces, under the cover of attack helicopters, killed at least 22 insurgents, the military said.
The raids took place in Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province, and involved air assaults under the cover of darkness, the military said in a statement.
The commander of Iraqi military operations in Diyala, Major General Abdul-Karim al-Rubaie, said Tuesday that handcuffs, swords and electricity cables – apparently used as torture implements – had been seized from militant safe houses in the area.
The operation was part of new U.S. and Iraqi attacks on Baghdad’s northern and southern flanks, which military officials said were aimed at clearing out Sunni insurgents, Al Qaeda fighters and Shiite militiamen who had fled the capital and Anbar Province during a four-month-old security operation.
A top U.S. military official said Monday that U.S. forces were taking advantage of the arrival of the final brigade of 30,000 additional U.S. troops to open the concerted attacks.
“We are going into the areas that have been sanctuaries of Al Qaeda and other extremists to take them on and weed them out, to help get the areas clear and to really take on Al Qaeda,” the senior official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the operation. “Those are areas in the belts around Baghdad, some parts in Anbar Province and specifically Diyala Province.”
Al Qaeda has proven to be an extremely agile foe for U.S. and Iraqi forces, as shown by its ability to transfer major operations to Baquba from Anbar, the sprawling desert region in western Iraq. There is no guarantee that driving the organization out of current sanctuaries would prevent it from migrating to other regions to continue the fight.
In recent months, the verdant orange and palm groves of Diyala have become one of the most fiercely contested regions in Iraq. The province is a tangle of Shiite and Sunni villages that has played into the hands of Al Qaeda and allied militants who have melted into the tense region and sought to inflame existing sectarian troubles.
Al Qaeda has conducted public executions in the Baquba main square and otherwise sought to enforce an extreme, Taliban-style, Islamic code. The terror organization’s actions in the province have caused some Sunni militants, Al Qaeda’s natural allies, to turn their guns on the group with U.S. assistance. Some militant Shiites are likewise joining government forces in a bid to remove the foreign fighters and Muslim extremists.
Separately, the U.S. military on Tuesday announced the death of a U.S. soldier in Baghdad. The soldier was killed by small arms fire during combat in an eastern section of the capital, a military statement said. No other soldiers were wounded in the attack, which took place Monday, it said.
The death brought to at least 3,528 the number of U.S. military personnel who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
In southern Iraq, the police and hospital officials said the death toll reached 22 in clashes that continued into a second day between Mahdi army fighters and Iraqi security forces in Nasiriyah, about 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, southeast of Baghdad.
More than 60 people were wounded, mostly policemen, the authorities said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, because of security concerns.
[International Herald Tribune]
Related Posts
Comments
3 Responses to “Car bomb kills dozens in Baghdad”
Leave a Reply
Posts
Tom_Shepherd…
Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince Y.E.S. 93.3 FM Cosmos 133 Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie Johann Walter Spinalis muscle Carbhemoglobin Édifice de la CIBC Advancement in Cub Scouts (Boy Scouts of America) Adamkiene …
New_Hamilton,_Mississippi…
Earl of Craven Civic virtue Khuman Lampak Main Stadium Home Again Pirates of the carribean dead man’s chest U.S. Senate Banking Committee Tuxicity Alpha Rho Chi Love Mode John Mikel …