BAGHDAD, 14 May 2005 — Iraq extended its six-month-old state of emergency yesterday against a backdrop of ever more violent insurgent attacks that have claimed the lives of more than 400 people since the start of the month. As US forces pressed on with a sweep of Iraq’s lawless west for Abu Mussab Zarqawi and his militants, aid workers reported that hundreds of families had fled the fierce fighting near the Syrian border.
Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari announced that because of the continuing security crisis, he was extending for 30 days the state of emergency in force across Iraq, except for three Kurdish provinces in the northern mountains.
The emergency, first introduced in November, allows the government to impose curfews, issue arrest warrants and restrict movement around the country.
In the latest violence, a suicide bomber drove his explosives-laden car at a truck transporting Iraqi soldiers in Baquba, north of the capital, killing two soldiers and a civilian.
Four more soldiers were wounded in a second car bomb attack on a convoy in the nearby village of Saif Saad. A policeman was shot dead and five people wounded when gunmen opened fire on a police patrol in western Baghdad.
In northern Iraq, two soldiers and three rebels were killed in clashes near Shurgat, south of the region’s main city of Mosul. Near the key refinery town of Baiji further south, one bomb killed a civilian while another killed one US soldier and wounded four.
The surge in violence, including an unprecedented string of car bombings, has left more than 400 dead since the start of the month and has hobbled efforts by Jaafari’s new Shiite-dominated government to seize the political initiative and rally the restive Sunni Arab former elite to his side.
US officials have been quietly pressing the Iraqi government to include more Sunnis, especially in the constitutional committee, the New York Times reported.
“There is a growing sense of alarm about this in the US government,” said a senior official the paper did not name. Yet most Sunnis insist they will not rejoin mainstream politics until Washington has set out a pullout timetable.
