BAGHDAD, 26 September 2005 — A suicide car bomber attacked an elite Iraqi police unit in Baghdad, killing 13 commandos in the worst of a series of violent incidents to hit the country yesterday. Iraqi police said the car bomber targeted the police commando patrol as they traveled on a highway in the east of the capital. Ten commandos were also wounded, police said.
The bomb followed clashes overnight between US troops and Shiite militiamen loyal to Moqtada Al-Sadr in the eastern Baghdad district of Sadr City. Police said eight militia fighters were killed and five wounded in the fighting.
Those clashes follow fighting between the militia and British troops in the southern city of Basra last week and could further strain efforts to bring security to Iraq with US and Iraqi forces already battling a Sunni Arab insurgency.
South of the capital, in Hilla, a bomber on a bicycle blew himself up in a crowded vegetable market, killing four people, including a woman and a child, and wounding 48, police said. And in western Baghdad, gunmen held up an armored Finance Ministry convoy, killing two guards and wounding nine before making off with $850,000 in cash, police said.
Seven Iraqis, two of them children, were killed and four wounded yesterday when two mortar shells fell in a commercial street in the center of Samarra, north of Baghdad, police said.
“The attackers apparently targeted a nearby Iraqi base but missed,” said police Capt. Akram Kamel.
The string of attacks comes three weeks before Iraq holds a referendum on a new draft constitution and amid a general increase in unrest both in central areas and in the southern city of Basra, where around 8,500 British troops are based.
In Ramadi, west of Baghdad, more than 1,000 people marched to protest the constitution, which they say will divide Iraq along sectarian lines by giving too much autonomy to Kurds in the north and pro-Iranian Shiites in the south. The crowd in Ramadi was largely made up of Sunni Arabs, whose leaders are strongly opposed to the constitution, but also included Shiite supporters of Sadr, a nationalist young cleric who heads a militia called the Mehdi Army.
The foreign minister of France, which strongly opposed the war on Iraq, called for a new international conference to try to draw the Sunni minority further into the political process.
