BAGHDAD, 12 May 2005 — At least 69 people were killed and more than 160 wounded as suicide bombers ripped through a crowded market and a line of security force recruits yesterday in a wave of explosions and gunfire across Iraq.
The bloody attacks came despite a major US offensive targeting followers of Iraq’s most-wanted terrorist near the Syrian border, a remote desert region believed to be a staging ground for some of the insurgents’ deadliest attacks.
More than two years after the United States declared the end of major combat, the day’s events underlined how intense the fight for Iraq’s future has become in the scant three months since Iraqis voted in the country’s first democratic elections.
More than 400 people have been killed in insurgent violence in less than two weeks since a new government was announced. Insurgents were averaging about 70 attacks a day at the start of May, up from 30-40 in February and March, said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for US forces in Iraq.
In Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, 130 kilometers north of Baghdad, a suicide car bomb exploded in a small market near a police station, killing at least 33 people and injuring 92, police and hospital officials said. The attacker swerved into a crowd of day laborers waiting to be picked up for work at construction sites when heavy security prevented the vehicle from reaching the station, police said.
Associated Press Television News footage showed charred and mutilated bodies piled up at the Tikrit General Hospital morgue. As yet another body arrived, a man with bloodied trousers sank to the floor and sobbed.
The Ansar Al-Sunnah Army claimed responsibility for the attack in a posting on its website yesterday. But it denied the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber and said it was aimed at Iraqis who work in the US base in Tikrit. The claim could not be verified.
In Hawija, 240 kilometers north of Baghdad, a man with hidden explosives slipped past security guards at a police and army recruitment center and blew himself up outside the building where some 150 applicants were lined up. At least 30 people were killed and 35 injured, police said.
“I was standing near the center and all of a sudden it turned into a scene of dead bodies and pools of blood,” police Sgt. Khalaf Abbas said by cell phone from the site. “Windows were blown out in nearby houses, leaving the street covered with glass.”
Four more car bombs exploded in Baghdad, three of them suicide attacks, the US military said. One of them caused an unspecified number of casualties in a US patrol, it said.
Iraqi police only had details for three attacks targeting a police station and two patrols in Baghdad. Four Iraqis were killed and 14 wounded, including at least three policemen, they said.
In western Baghdad, gunmen clashed with a police patrol on a highway, killing one officer and wounding another.
Another bomb exploded at Iraq’s largest fertilizer plant in Basra, 550 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, killing one person and wounding 23, police and employees said. The blast set fire to a gas pipeline and destroyed about 60 percent of the plant.
The latest violence came as hundreds of American troops in tanks and light armored reconnaissance vehicles rolled through remote desert outposts dotted along the Euphrates River in search of followers of Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi.
Operation Matador, which entered its fourth day yesterday, was launched after US intelligence showed insurgents had moved into the northern Jazirah Desert after suffering losses in Fallujah and Ramadi, further east.
US military spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool said the region is used as staging area for foreign fighters who cross into Iraq from Syria along ancient smuggling routes known as “rat lines”.
— With input from agencies
