BAGHDAD, 26 June 2005 — Iraqi interests focused yesterday on Japan, Turkey and the United States, but in the end, international issues were upstaged by ongoing violence that killed 29 and wounded dozens more. The US asked Japan to extend its humanitarian mission in Iraq, while President Jalal Talabani urged Ankara to set its doubts aside and help Kurds in war-torn Iraq.
In Washington, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari pursued efforts to help President George W. Bush drum up support for the US military effort despite a mounting casualty toll and declining public support.
Iraqi deaths also climbed higher, with at least 29 people killed in Samarra, near Ramadi and in the Triangle of Death. The biggest toll was in Samarra, north of the capital, where at least 11 people died and 20 were wounded in two attacks on the home of a senior Iraqi police commando. A suicide car bomber blew himself up outside the officer’s home, before a roadside bomb exploded nearby, a police source said. Four homes were destroyed in the blast.
That followed the grim discovery of corpses belonging to eight policemen and five poultry vendors who died in separate attacks south and west of Baghdad. The vendors’ bodies were found bound and with bullet holes in their heads near a river in the area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death, a relative said. “It was a horrible sight,” said Abdel Hussein. “Unbelievable”. The bodies of eight policemen who had been manning a checkpoint on the road between the western city of Ramadi and the Syrian border were found after being kidnapped one day earlier.
In Tokyo, a senior Japanese official was quoted by Kyodo News as saying an extension of the Japanese mission would be “inevitable” if US-led forces stayed in Iraq beyond December, when 600 Japanese troops were due to leave. But it was Japan’s first military deployment since 1945 to a country at war, and government spokesman Hiroyuki Hosoda said that in the end, Tokyo would make its own decision.
In Ankara, Talabani dismissed hopes by fellow Kurds in Iraq for independence in their northern enclave as “unrealistic” and extended an olive branch to Turkey, calling it an important regional player that should stand by the Kurds.
