BAGHDAD, 26 March 2005 — Rebels killed a high-ranking Iraq army officer and five cleaning women in drive-by shootings, while two car bombs in 24 hours killed 12 people, US Army and Iraqi Interior Ministry sources said yesterday. Col. Salman Mohammed Hassan was killed by gunmen and his three sons were wounded, one of them seriously, after they left a funeral service at a mosque in southeastern Baghdad, security and Interior Ministry sources said.
Hassan, who served as a brigadier general in Baghdad during the US invasion two years ago, was visiting the capital from Basra, where he was assigned, Iraqi army spokesman Capt. Feras Al-Tamimi, told reporters.
In another blow against the army, an Iraqi soldier was killed and three others wounded yesterday in a suicide car bomb attack at a checkpoint outside Iskandariyah, the army said. Iskandariyah falls within a stretch of towns south of Baghdad known as the triangle of death for its daily diet of killings, kidnappings and robbery.
The attack followed a suicide car bombing late Thursday in Ramadi in which 11 Iraqi police commandos were killed and 14 more wounded, including two US soldiers, US military spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Poole told reporters. The suicide car bomb blew up at a checkpoint in eastern Ramadi, said Iraqi Gen. Mohammed Al-Azawi, head of the Interior Ministry commando unit for Al-Anbar province.
Also Thursday, Iraqi cleaning women working at a US base southeast of Baghdad were killed when their car was raked by gunfire, an Interior Ministry source said.
Gunmen traveling in a vehicle opened fire on the women in the Mashtal neighborhood, east of the capital, the source added. Family members of the five women said they worked on a base in Rustumiyah. In the northern city of Rabia, a tragic friendly fire incident near the Syrian border between Iraqi police and Kurdish peshmerga fighters on Thursday killed seven policemen, Kurdish officials said. Tribal sheikh Abdullah Adjil Al-Yawar yesterday warned peshmerga fighters not to show their faces in the region, saying people were very angry at them and might not be able to control their emotions.
In other developments yesterday, a mortar attack on an Iraqi army barracks in Suleiman Beg killed one soldier and wounded a man who had come to visit his son, said an army spokesman.
