BAGHDAD, 20 October 2006 — A suicide truck bomber’s deadly blast kicked off another day of violence in Iraq yesterday as a fierce debate over how to prosecute the war gripped London and Washington.
The northern city of Mosul shuddered under a whole series of apparently coordinated attacks going off every 20 minutes, including several suicide car bombs, mortar fire and small arms attacks against coalition forces and Iraqi police.
By far the biggest attack was a massive suicide truck bomb against a police station that local authorities say killed 11 and wounded 26 - the vast majority innocent bystanders.
Police have closed the entrances to the city and imposed a curfew following the 10 attacks, which took place over just three hours. The toll aside from the truck bomb is estimated at four civilian dead. There is no word about US casualties, and two of the suicide attacks were against US forces. The attacks came amid a spectacular surge in insurgent and sectarian violence, which has claimed hundreds of lives in the three weeks since the start of Ramadan.
Iraqi security forces and their US allies remain the targets of choice for Sunni insurgents, and military and police casualties are also climbing steeply.
In a press conference yesterday, Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf maintained that violence was on the downswing with “terrorist acts” down 15 percent in the last week and sectarian killings down 60 percent. “This is a good sign because it shows the terrorists in the provinces near Baghdad were dealt a blow,” he said. Against this backdrop, the debate over the war is heating up in Washington, forcing an unusual admission from President George W. Bush that the situation is in some ways comparable to Vietnam in 1968. The Iraq war’s most determined defender, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has always rejected Vietnam comparisons, but said Wednesday he hopes to increase the number of frontline army and marine fighting units.
US strategy has long been to build up Iraq’s government and security forces until they are able to contain extremist elements, but this year’s outbreak of sectarian violence has exposed serious failings in Iraqi units. Now, Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s own determination to fight the militias is also in question, after he ordered US forces Wednesday to release a Shiite militant whom they detained on suspicion of running a death squad.
Maliki has nevertheless vowed that he will persuade the armed factions to stand down and, yesterday, Moqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia complained that four of their militants had been seized.
The head of Sadr’s office in the southern town of Hindiya, Razzaq Abed, said local commander Saad Hamud Ahmed and three comrades had been arrested by Iraqi Army troops and accused of “planting bombs to target Iraqi and US forces.”
In other violence, five people were killed, including two police, in a bomb attack against a police convoy and Brig. Gen. Kadhim Mahdi of the border police was assassinated in the south Baghdad neighborhood of Saidiyah. Across Diyalah province, northeast of Baghdad, three people were killed in separate incidents.
Eight people were killed and 70 wounded in a suicide car bombing yesterday against a bank in the northern Iraqi oil hub of Kirkuk, the latest violence to strike the multiethnic city, police said. The bomber blew up his car at the entrance to Bab Al-Aswad bank in the south of Kirkuk just as Iraqi soldiers were waiting to collect their salaries, said local police chief Adel Zine Al-Abidin.
