BAGHDAD, 19 May 2005 — Insurgents continued their campaign to destabilize the country on a day Iraq’s defense minister vowed to regain the upper hand over the country’s bloody insurgency, as 11 people were killed in separate attacks, bringing the death toll for the bloody month of May close to 500.
The US and Iraqi forces reported numerous arrests. Among those arrested were the suspected ringleaders of a May 4 suicide bombing in Arbil, northern Iraq, in which 50 people died, Kurdish security officials said.
“We will work hard to make Iraq a haven of peace,” Saadun Al-Dulaimi, the newly appointed Sunni defense minister, told reporters in Baghdad. “We are going to meet commanders on the ground, resolve the problems they are facing and do everything to make sure they bring order back to Iraq. Within a few weeks or months, friendly forces will only have a support role,” he told reporters.
Eleven more Iraqis were killed yesterday in a string of incidents in and north of Baghdad, security sources said. Four Iraqi security forces were killed in a suicide car bomb attack against a joint US-Iraqi military convoy near the northern town of Baiji, said army Capt. Ali Yusef, updating an earlier toll of two.
Two civilians, an Iraqi soldier and a contractor working for the military in the restive town of Dhuluiyah, further south, were killed when mortar rounds were fired on the compound. In the northern city of Mosul, a large group of gunmen attacked a police academy, sparking an intense gunbattle that left one civilian dead and three wounded, including a child and a woman, police Maj. Mohammed Fathi said.
A police investigator with the rank of general was assassinated here and his wife wounded, while an army captain was killed by a bomb planted under his vehicle near Balad, north of the capital, security and medical sources said. In nearby Dujail, the bodies of four Iraqi truck drivers working for a company contracted by the US military were found, an army officer said.
Dulaimi’s words also came amid growing sectarian tensions across the country. The Committee of Muslim Scholars — the main Sunni authority in Iraq — called yesterday for Dulaimi’s resignation and that of Interior Minister Bayan Baqer Solagh, blaming them for the murder of two Sunni clerics recently. An escalation of tit-for-tat sectarian killings between majority Shiites and the previously dominant Sunni Arabs has raised the specter of a civil conflict.
Meanwhile, a senior US military official said leaders close to top Iraqi insurgent Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi had ordered a recent car bombing campaign that has constituted the bulk of May’s deaths.
“There was a meeting of the insurgent leadership” with Zarqawi-linked commanders in attendance, the official said, in which “instructions were issued to use more car bombs in everyday operations.” The number of car bombs in the Baghdad area, which stood at 25 for the whole of last year, has rocketed recently, with 21 incidents this month alone, the US military said.
— With input from agencies.
