KERBALA, 3 November 2005 — A car bomb outside a Shiite mosque in central Iraq killed at least 23 people and wounded 46 yesterday, in an apparent sectarian attack.
Earlier several roadside bombs and shootings killed at least a dozen people, mostly in Baghdad, and a US Marine helicopter came down in Ramadi, killing both crewmembers. US forces launched an airstrike near the crash site and a local doctor said there were dozens of casualties.
With six weeks to go before parliamentary elections that Washington hopes will set Iraq on the path to stability, the Iraqi government issued an appeal to former junior officers in Saddam Hussein’s military to return to the colors two years after they were fired by the US occupiers.
The car bomb in the mainly Shiite town of Musayyib, south of Baghdad, came as people were preparing for the three-day Eid holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Eid should start today or tomorrow.
The Interior Ministry said 23 people had been killed in the attack, which used a remotely detonated car bomb. Musayyib has been hit by several attacks, including one in July when a suicide bomber blew up a fuel truck, killing at least 98 people and wounding 75.
The town sits on a fault line between the Shiite and the Sunni communities in an area where Saddam resettled many of his supporters on rich farmland south of the capital.
US commanders have warned of a rise in bloodshed in the run-up to the Dec. 15 election. In a statement issued before the main annual Muslim holiday, Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi, one of the few Sunnis in the government, invited former officers with the ranks of major, captain and lieutenant to return to the army.
With the election looming, there may be a political as well as practical security motive behind the move. The loss of army pay has been a major source of discontent among Saddam’s fellow minority Sunni Arabs, who dominated the officer corps.
Senior officers, many of whom are regarded as having been too close to Saddam’s Baath party, were not invited back en masse, though some have returned to lead the new Iraqi military.
Within weeks of Saddam’s fall in April 2003, US administrator Paul Bremer disbanded at a stroke Iraq’s 400,000-strong armed forces and security agencies. US officials said it simply formalized the fact that the army had evaporated in the aftermath of the war.
But the violence continued to claim lives yesterday: Two separate roadside bombs in Baghdad killed five Iraqi soldiers and five civilians; a policeman was shot elsewhere in Baghdad and another soldier killed by a bomb in Fallujah.
Two US Marines were killed when their Super Cobra helicopter crashed in the area of Ramadi west of Baghdad, the military said. The cause of the crash was under investigation but witnesses reported it had come under fire from the ground.
In pre-dawn airstrikes yesterday, the military said US-led coalition air forces had bombed three Al-Qaeda safe houses in the area of Qusayba, and at least six insurgents had been reported killed.
