BAGHDAD, 12 April 2005 — A pickup truck exploded near a US convoy as it patrolled a crowded market yesterday evening in the troubled city of Samarra, killing at least three people and injuring more than 20 others, hospital official Abdul Nasir Hamid said. US military officials did not immediately have information on the blast. Mosque loudspeakers urged residents to donate blood as the wounded poured into the hospital. Most of the injured were women and children, Hamid said.
The attack occurred a few minutes before the city’s 8 p.m. curfew on cars. Residents must be off the streets by 10 p.m. Samarra, 95 kilometers north of Baghdad, is located in the country’s infamous Sunni Triangle, a region dominated by the country’s insurgency.
Also yesterday, the terror group Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed to have carried out its second major attack against a US base in a little over a week, saying it was responsible for suicide bombers who tried to ram two cars and a fire truck into a small Marine outpost in the town of Qaim, along Iraq’s border with Syria.
The attack on a security checkpoint at Camp Gannon injured three Marines and three civilians, the US military and hospital officials said.
“The drivers of the vehicles were stopped short of the camp by forces manning the checkpoints,” the military said in a statement.
Military authorities said the explosions slightly damaged the camp’s concrete barriers and barbed wire, as well as a nearby mosque.
Insurgents also opened fire on the camp, and a US attack helicopter destroyed a car with a gunman inside, officials said. It was unclear how many insurgents and suicide bombers were killed in the assault. Three Marines were evacuated for medical treatment.
The attack came nine days after dozens of insurgents used rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and a car bomb in a failed attempt to break into the US military’s controversial Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed to have carried out that attack, too, although none of their statements can be independently confirmed.
Also yesterday, hundreds of US and Iraqi forces launched their biggest Baghdad raid in recent weeks, moving on foot through a central neighborhood and rounding up dozens of suspected insurgents, the military said.
About 500 members of Iraq’s police and army swept through buildings in the Rashid neighborhood along with some 200 American soldiers, detaining 65 suspected militants, Lt. Col. Clifford Kent of the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division said.
— With input from agencies
