BAGHDAD, 3 January 2005 — Suicide car bombers hit a bus packed with National Guards yesterday, killing 26 people in the deadliest attack of its kind in four months on Iraqis cooperating with US forces to secure a Jan. 30 election.
Two insurgents in an explosives-laden vehicle veered into the path of the bus and blew it up outside a US military base near the town of Balad, north of Baghdad.
Hours later, guerrillas killed three policemen on patrol close to neighboring Samarra, and shot dead a member of the city’s governing council as well as his driver and bodyguard.
The attacks in the Sunni heartland, where loyalty to deposed dictator Saddam Hussein runs deep, were the latest targeting Iraq’s fledgling security forces and government officials in a bloody campaign to scare voters away from the polls.
A National Guard officer said the car bomb killed 25 soldiers on the way to their posts. Relatives wept over the men’s bodies at a local mosque. “My son, my son,” one man wailed as he clutched at a wooden coffin.
A civilian bystander also died in the blast.
US and Iraqi officials ushered in the new year with warnings of an expected spike in pre-election assaults by Sunni insurgents trying to drive out US-led forces and topple Iraq’s government.
“Those responsible for this attack ... are trying to prevent democracy in Iraq,” said Maj. Neal O’Brien, a military spokesman in Tikrit. “They will not be successful.”
But in a sign that the campaign of intimidation was having an effect, an election organizing committee in the northern Sunni city of Baiji quit en masse after receiving death threats.
On Saturday, the Al-Qaeda Organization of Holy War in Iraq led by Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi released a video of five Iraqi security men being shot dead in the street.
A statement posted on a website along with the video vowed that the group would “slaughter” other Iraqis it brands collaborators with foreign occupiers.
Yesterday’s bombing was the deadliest suicide attack against Iraqi security services since mid-September, when at least 47 people were killed outside a Baghdad police station.
Guerrillas have killed hundreds of security force members since the US-led invasion in 2003. Many Iraqis wonder how police and National Guards will be able to protect voters at polling places when they can barely protect themselves.
Insurgents assassinated two local government officials for Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, and an Iraqi police major outside his home in Baghdad on Saturday, signaling they would persist with their killing spree in the new year.
Zarqawi’s group claimed responsibility for one of the deaths, that of Nawfal Abdul-Hussein Al-Shimari, head of Diyala’s governing council.
Yesterday, insurgents ordered all municipal workers out of the main local government building in the town of Sharqat, near the volatile northern city of Mosul, and blew it up.
In the Al-Qaeda-linked group’s video, masked militants lined up five National Guardsmen, their hands bound behind their backs, and shot them from behind. Passers-by stopped to watch.
“To the families of civil defense forces, the National Guard and the police we tell you to say your final goodbyes to your sons before you send them to us. Our reward to your sons is slaughter,” a masked militant said in a statement. Five men in civilian clothes were found shot dead in Ramadi, capital of restive Anbar province, earlier this week. A note said they were security men killed by guerrilla fighters.
— With input from agencies
