BAGHDAD, 13 February 2005 — Car bombs killed 18 people in Iraq yesterday and injured 24 others. The first blast in a mostly Shiite Muslim town south of Baghdad killed 17, and US troops backed by tanks battled rebels in the country’s third largest city as the insurgency showed no sign of abating after national elections.
The second car bomb exploded in an eastern Baghdad neighborhood as a US military convoy passed, killing an Iraqi woman and wounding three others but causing no American casualties, Iraqi police said. The bomb exploded about a kilometer from a US Army base.
The car bomb south of Baghdad exploded near the main hospital in Musayyib, a mostly Shiite town 60 kilometers south of Baghdad along the Euphrates River. The town is in a religiously mixed area that has been the scene of frequent attacks by insurgents.
It appeared the attack was part of a campaign by extremists against the country’s Shiites — an estimated 60 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people — who stand on the verge of a major victory as officials finish the final counting from the Jan. 30 national elections.
Partial returns show a Shiite-dominated ticket endorsed by the Shiite clergy leading in the race for the 275 seats in the National Assembly. Shiite religious groups appear to have won control of provincial councils in wide areas of the country, including the two biggest cities, Baghdad and Basra.
Sunni extremists, fearing a loss of their privileged position, have accused the Americans of manipulating the election to install Shiites and Kurds in power. Sunnis, an estimated 20 percent of the population, form the heart of the insurgency, and many of them boycotted the election.
In Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, two gunmen assassinated a prominent Iraqi judge who served under Saddam Hussein. The judge, Taha Al-Amiri, was the former chief jurist on Basra’s highest criminal court and was among several former Baath Party figures murdered in the city over the past 18 months.
Suspicion has fallen on Shiite extremists seeking revenge for Saddam’s oppression of the majority Shiite community.
US and Iraqi officials hoped the Jan. 30 election would eventually produce a stable government with the resources and public support to crush the insurgency. In the short run, however, US military officials have warned that the war with the Sunni insurgents was far from over.
Underscoring that warning, fierce clashes broke out yesterday in the northern city of Mosul after American troops, responding to a mortar attack on one of their bases, came under small arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire from a mosque, US officials said.
The insurgents disabled a US Army tank and a Stryker armored vehicle during the battle, which raged for hours around the mosque, according to Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla. US troops killed nine insurgents but suffered no fatalities, Kurilla said.
A woman died when a mortar round hit her house during the fighting, and another person was killed when a bomb exploded in another part of Mosul, hospital officials said.
Earlier yesterday, police in Mosul discovered the bodies of 12 men — six dressed in Iraqi National Guard uniforms and the others Kurdish security guards — dumped in two areas of the city.
Notes left near the bodies of the Iraqi guardsmen said, “This is the destiny for those who participated in besieging Fallujah,” referring to last November’s US-led assault.
— With input from agencies
