BAGHDAD, 5 August 2006 — Insurgents killed dozens of Iraqis, most of them police officers, in a wave of bombings across the country yesterday, after US generals warned the country could slip into a civil war.
While much attention was focused on Baghdad, where hundreds of thousands of Shiite activists marched in support of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, the worst of the violence erupted well beyond the capital in the far north.
The northern city of Mosul woke to a dawn blitz of six bombs and a hail of mortars, which killed at least nine police officers and triggered a six-hour gunbattle in which an unknown number of insurgents were killed.
Nineveh Province’s police chief, Maj. Gen. Wathiq Al-Hamdani, blamed fighters inspired by Osama Bin Laden for the attack.
“These are members of Al-Qaeda that we clashed with. We killed large numbers of them and we burned their trucks and vehicles. We are in full control of the situation. The people of Mosul were very helpful,” he told state television.
Mosul, 370 kilometers (200 miles) from Baghdad, has a majority Sunni Arab population and significant Turkmen and Kurdish ethnic minorities. It is often the scene of violent attacks on security forces.
“The situation is still volatile, and clashes are continuing in parts of the city,” a senior officer told AFP from Mosul, adding that a vehicle curfew had been imposed from 10 a.m. yesterday until 6 a.m. today.
Farther south in Nineveh, in the town of Al-Hadrah, a suicide bomber plowed an explosives-laden car into a group of police protecting a football match, killing three officers and seven civilians, police said.
In the early hours of the morning, a roadside bomb killed a pregnant Iraqi woman and her husband as they raced to hospital to deliver her child. Police said the couple were taking a taxi at 2 a.m. from the village of Huweidar toward the maternity hospital in Diyala provincial capital Baquba.
The cab driver and the man’s sister-in-law were injured in the blast.
Meanwhile, a former member of one of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s security services was shot dead in the southern city of Amara, police said.
And, a short distance south of Baghdad, a bystander was killed in a botched attempt to target a police patrol with a roadside bomb.
The killings came a day after the top US commander for the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, told US lawmakers that Iraq could slide into civil war, three years after a US-led invasion overthrew Saddam’s regime.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis clad in the white shrouds of martyrs prayed in the middle of Sadrein Square in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City and then marched the kilometer distance to Mudhaffer Square, in the largest pro-Lebanon demonstration in the region. Countless ranks of protesters waved yellow Hezbollah flags as well as the Lebanese and Iraqi national standards and chanted their support for Hezbollah and condemnation of Israel.
