BAGHDAD, 9 February 2005 — A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of Iraqis outside an army recruitment center in Baghdad yesterday, killing 22 other people and injuring 30 more, the US military said. It was the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital since last week’s election.
There were conflicting reports about the attack, which occurred at an Iraqi National Guard headquarters at the Muthana airfield. Iraqi officials blamed the explosion on mortar fire and officials at Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital said they had received 16 bodies from the scene, all of them army recruits.
But witnesses reported only one explosion, and the US military said the blast was caused by a suicide bomber.
The blast came a day after suicide bombers killed 27 people in attacks in two Iraqi cities. Between them, the three bombs have shattered the lull in violence which followed the poll.
The Al-Qaeda wing in Iraq, led by Jordanian Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for the attack, as it did for Monday’s blasts in the cities of Mosul and Baquba.
“Here come the convoys of martyrs to strike the headquarters of infidels and apostates, and this is the beginning of the escalation we had promised,” the group said in a statement posted on an Islamist website.
It described the victims as “apostate pagan guards who are agents of the Jews and crusaders”.
Elsewhere, three police officers were killed in clashes in Baghdad’s western Ghazaliya neighborhood, scene of numerous clashes and assassinations over the past six months.
Also yesterday, assailants sprayed a politician’s car with gunfire, killing two of the man’s sons, an Interior Ministry official said. The politician, Mithal Al-Alusi, who has been a vocal critic of Syria and Iran and was widely criticized in Iraq for visiting Israel last year, escaped the attack unhurt.
Alusi, one of the candidates who ran in Iraq’s landmark Jan. 30 elections, gained notoriety last year after he was expelled from the Iraqi National Congress party for attending a terrorism conference in Israel.
Iraqi police claimed at least one success in their fight with insurgents, arresting a man they believe was involved in beheading people working with US-led forces in Mosul.
The government also said it captured a relative of Saddam Hussein last month. Basher Mutar Al-Tikriti is suspected of supporting and sheltering members of Saddam’s regime, including Saddam’s son Qusay, it said.
On Monday, gunmen killed an Iraqi chef employed by American forces at Baghdad International Airport, hospital officials said yesterday.
The violence is picking up again in the Iraqi capital following the Jan. 30 elections, when a massive security crackdown prevented insurgents from launching major attacks. Iraqis chose a 275-member National Assembly and provincial councils, as well as a regional parliament in the Kurdish-controlled north.
Final results of the election are expected this week. The latest partial returns released yesterday showed a Kurdish ticket had moved into second place behind a coalition of Shiite parties, relegating a faction led by US-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to third place.
First election returns from the Sunni heartland — including Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit — confirmed on Monday that many Sunnis stayed away from the ballot box, leaving the field to Shiite and Kurdish candidates. A Shiite-dominated ticket backed by the clergy leads among the 111 candidate lists, with a final tally of last week’s National Assembly election expected by week’s end.
Allawi, who favors strong ties with the United States, had hoped to emerge as a compromise choice for prime minister, but those on the Shiite cleric-backed ticket say they want one of their own for the top job.
Kurds, estimated at 15-20 percent of the population, gave most of their votes to a joint ticket made up of the two major Kurdish parties, which was in second with about 24 percent of the votes reported as of Monday. One of the Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani, has announced his candidacy for the presidency.
Allawi’s ticket trailed with about 13 percent of the vote, with the Shiite ticket leading with about half the votes. Shiites comprise about 60 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people.
In a move which may ease Western fears that Iraq will turn into a new Iran, a spokesman for the country’s top Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani denied Sistani was demanding Iraq’s new constitution be based solely on Islamic law.
Drafting a new constitution will be the main task of the new national assembly which will emerge from last month’s vote.
Yesterday’s attacks were the latest sign that insurgents are stepping up their assault on Iraq’s security forces, which the United States hopes can assume a greater role once a newly elected government takes office.
A day earlier, a suicide bomber also wandered into a crowd of Iraqi policemen near a hospital in the northern city of Mosul, killing 12 officers. The attacks by bombers on foot point to a shift in rebel tactics, as concrete blast walls and roadblocks have made it harder for guerillas to strike at Iraqi security forces with car bombs.
Also yesterday, a militant group claimed in an Internet statement that it has executed a female Italian journalist abducted in Baghdad for spying on “holy fighters.”
There was no way to verify the authenticity of the statement, which offered no proof that Giuliana Sgrena, a 56-year-old reporter, had been held by the group. She was kidnapped by gunmen on Friday in Baghdad.
The bombings, shootings and kidnappings have shattered a brief downturn in violence after the Jan. 30 elections, the first nationwide balloting since the fall of Saddam in April 2003.
Election officials acknowledged thousands of people in the Sunni-dominated Mosul area who wanted to vote during the balloting were unable to because of security. Fewer than a third of the planned 330 polling centers in Mosul and the surrounding province managed to open on election day, officials said.
