BAGHDAD, 2 November 2005 — The US military announced yesterday the death of another soldier in Iraq, bringing October losses to 94, the fourth biggest monthly toll since the invasion, after a car bomb killed 18 people in the normally quiet city of Basra. The soldier’s death in a roadside bombing near the Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold of Fallujah on Monday also brought the overall US toll to at least 2,022 since the invasion in March 2003.
The car bombing in the southern port city of Basra ripped through a market packed with shoppers ahead of the Muslim holiday of Eid Al-Fitr later this week, and had apparently targeted a police patrol. Eighteen people died and 59 were wounded according to a revised, lower toll, the province’s chief medical officer Raad Daud Salman said, while Gov. Mohammed Mosbah Al-Wali added that two suspects had been arrested.
In violence yesterday, a boy wearing an explosives belt blew himself up in the northern oil center of a Kirkuk, wounding the city’s police chief Gen. Khattab Abdullah Areb and his driver. Just south of Baghdad in the unrest hotspot dubbed the Triangle of Death, at least three Iraqi policemen were killed in a roadside bombing near the town of Mahmudiyah.
Loyalists of Al-Qaeda’s Iraq frontman Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi posted an Internet statement saying they had ended their investigation of two Moroccan embassy personnel held hostage and had “referred them to trial.”
In the Iraqi capital, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari called on the United Nations to extend the mandate of the US-led multinational force in Iraq by one year, state television reported.
Jaafari “has asked, in a letter to the Security Council, for a one-year extension of the multinational force,” Iraqi television reported.
Meanwhile, the Eid festival was good news for around 675 inmates who were freed in Iraq yesterday, including about 500 from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, authorities said. One man freed from a jail run by Interior Ministry commandos in the capital told reporters his dream “was to leave Iraq and never come back.”
An Interior Ministry spokesman said his services had nabbed the mastermind behind a spectacular triple suicide attack against the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in central Baghdad that killed 17 people on Oct. 24.
“We arrested Jassem Al-Thur and 13 accomplices who planned the attacks,” said Col. Ali Abu Al-Hassan of the ministry’s elite Wolf Brigade.
