BAGHDAD, 13 May 2005 — Iraqi insurgents killed 21 Iraqis, including a general and a colonel, and five American soldiers yesterday as violence in the country showed no signs of abating.
The latest violence came despite a major US offensive aimed at followers of Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, Iraq’s most-wanted terrorist, in a remote desert region near the Syrian border said to be a staging ground for some of the deadliest attacks.
Four car bombs, including at least two suicide attacks, went off in Baghdad, said Master Sgt. Greg Kaufman, a US military spokesman. There were no US casualties in three of the attacks, but Kaufman had no casualty information from the fourth attack.
In the worst attack, an explosives-rigged car detonated near a market and cinema in the eastern New Baghdad neighborhood, killing 17 Iraqis and wounding 65, including women and children, police Lt. Col. Ahmed Aboud said. The blast set fire to shops and cars and damaged a nearby apartment building. An enraged crowd turned its anger on security forces and journalists, beating at least two Iraqi photographers and throwing stones at Iraqi police and US forces. Police and US troops fired in the air to disperse the crowd.
Elsewhere in the capital, insurgents shot and killed Brig. Gen. Iyad Imad Mahdi as he drove to work at the Ministry of Defense and Col. Fadhil Mohammed Mobarak on his way to the Interior Ministry, where he headed its police control room.
Two more car bombs exploded in the northern city of Kirkuk, 290 km from Baghdad. One blast happened near a police station in a central residential area, killing two people and wounding two, said police Capt. Sarhad Talabani. The other car bomb detonated at a site where experts were dismantling an improvised explosive devise. Two of the explosives experts were wounded in the blast.
The US military said five US troops were killed. Two Marines were killed and 14 others wounded late Wednesday when their vehicle struck an explosive device in Qaim, 320 km west of Baghdad, the military said in a statement.
A soldier died yesterday from wounds inflicted by a bomb that exploded near his vehicle east of Musayyib, about 60 km south of Baghdad. A second soldier was killed and another injured by a roadside bomb that exploded near their patrol in Samarra, 95 km north of Baghdad.
In the capital, a Task Force Baghdad soldier was killed when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle, the military said.
— Additional input from agencies
