BAGHDAD, 31 October 2005 — Adviser to the Iraqi Cabinet Ghaleb Abdel Mehdi died of his wound after his car was ambushed by gunmen in Baghdad yesterday. His driver was killed in the attack. Mehdi’s brother — Adel Abdel Mehdi — is one of the country’s two vice presidents.
In violence later in the day, Iraq’s Deputy Trade Minister Kais Dawud Hassan was wounded, an Interior Ministry official said.
In the attack on Hassan’s convoy in the west of the city, gunmen killed two of his bodyguards and wounded six more. Hassan was rushed to hospital, but his condition was not immediately known.
Meanwhile, the death toll from the suicide truck bombing on Saturday evening rose to 30 people and wounded 42, as Pentagon estimates showed that more than 60 Iraqis are killed or wounded every day by insurgent attacks.
In a first partial public count of Iraqi casualties in the war, available yesterday, the Pentagon estimated nearly 26,000 Iraqis were killed or wounded in attacks by insurgents since January 2004, with the daily number increasing fairly steadily.
In Saturday’s attack, the bomber parked a truck laden with dates in the center of Howaider and gathered a crowd of customers around the vehicle to buy the produce before he detonated a massive charge, police said.
Among the dead were merchants breaking the daily Ramadan fast at sunset in their shops around the marketplace and people out enjoying the festive atmosphere of dusk in the holy month.
Ethnic tensions in the northern city of Mosul crackled yesterday after Sunni Arab police and armed Arab tribesmen took to the streets late on Saturday in protest at what they say is a Kurdish-dominated regional government.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a German magazine interview published yesterday that US forces were making inroads on the insurgency, though he warned attacks might rise in the run-up to December’s elections.
The blast in Howaider came a day after a deadline for parties to register for the elections that Washington is hoping will set Iraq firmly on the path to peace and democracy, two and a half years after the US-led invasion. It also comes at the end of a week which saw the United States mark the 2,000th US military death in Iraq.
Recent weeks have been marked by a relative lull in violence, despite an Oct. 15 referendum and the start of Saddam Hussein’s trial for crimes against humanity.
Iraqi authorities and US commanders attribute the lull to a crackdown on insurgents.
Individuals claiming to speak for some Sunni nationalist rebel groups have, however, said they had held back to encourage Sunnis to turn out and vote “No”.
“The pressure applied on terrorists and insurgents is having an effect,” Rumsfeld told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine.
A Pentagon report to Congress said casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces rose from about 26 a day between Jan. 1 and March 31, 2004, to about 64 a day between Aug. 29 and Sept. 16, 2005, just before the constitutional referendum.
The numbers exclude Iraqis killed or wounded by US forces, for which the Pentagon says it does not release data. The Pentagon has not previously provided such a comprehensive estimate of the Iraqi casualty toll from insurgent attacks.
“Approximately 80 percent of all attacks are directed against Coalition Forces, but 80 percent of all casualties are suffered by Iraqis,” the report said.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa charged in an interview published yesterday that Washington’s refusal to offer a troop withdrawal timetable was threatening the stability of Iraq.
“The United States don’t believe this issue to be linked to reconciliation efforts while the Arab League argues that it is key,” he told the state-owned Roz Al-Yusef daily.
