BAGHDAD, 15 August 2007 — Dozens of uniformed gunmen in 17 official vehicles stormed an Oil Ministry compound in Baghdad yesterday and abducted a deputy oil minister and four other officials, a ministry spokesman and police said.
Just north of the capital, a suicide truck bomber struck a strategic bridge on the highway linking Baghdad with Mosul. Police said at least 10 people died.
Farther north, a suicide attacker drove a fuel truck into a residential neighborhood populated by members of the Yazidi sect, killing at least nine people and wounding 14, police Brig. Gen. Maawad Ahmed said. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack in the town of Qahataniya, 120 km west of Mosul, but it bore the hallmark of Al-Qaeda, which has been regrouping in the north of the country after being driven from safe havens in Anbar and Diyala provinces.
One of the Baghdad kidnap victims was Abdel Jabar Al-Wagaa, the senior assistant to Oil Minister Hussain Al-Shahristani. He was spirited away by more than 50 gunmen wearing security forces uniforms and driving what were believed to be military vehicles, said Assem Jihad, the Oil Ministry spokesman.
An Interior Minister official, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to release the information, said a top official in the State Oil Marketing Organization and three directors general in the operation also were kidnapped.
The official said five bodyguards were wounded in the raid on the State Oil Marketing Organization complex in eastern Baghdad.
Five Britons were seized May 29 in a similar raid on Iraq’s Finance Ministry, not far from the oil marketing office. They were taken by gunmen wearing police uniforms and have not been found.
Both government organizations are near the lawless Sadr City Shiite enclave, a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia.
The raid also was reminiscent of an attack by Mahdi Army fighters, dressed as Interior Ministry commandos, who stormed a Higher Education Ministry office on Nov. 14 and snatched away as many as 200 people. Dozens of those kidnap victims were never found.
The bridge bombing, cut the highway linking Baghdad with Mosul. The suicide bomber drove his truck onto a canal bridge and detonated it, sending three small buses, another truck and cars plunging into the water, police said. At least 10 people were killed.
The Thiraa Dijla bridge in Taji, a town near a US air base 20 km north of the capital, was blown apart about noon, police said. The span carried the main highway to the northern city of Mosul, Iraq’s third largest, across a canal linking the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The same bridge was bombed three months ago, leaving only one lane open.
