BAGHDAD, 27 December 2006 — A series of bomb attacks killed another 20 Iraqis yesterday and pushed the number of American soldiers killed beyond the death toll of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Among the dead were 16 Baghdad residents killed in a triple car bombing and three children heading to school in the northern city of Kirkuk, amid unprecedented bloodshed in a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
The macabre US milestone was marked, according to an AFP count, when three soldiers were slain in a bomb attack northwest of Baghdad.
This brought the total number of American service personnel and US Defense Department civilians killed in Iraq to 2,975, according to an AFP tally. This is two more than the 2,973 people killed on Sept. 11, 2001, when Al-Qaeda hijackers seized four airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvanian field.
US President George W. Bush responded by declaring a “war on terror,” ousting the Taleban in Afghanistan which harbored Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and arguing that tyrants like Saddam Hussein could not be left in place.
The landmark American death toll, emerging over the Christmas holiday season, represents another political blow for Bush, who earlier this month was forced to admit for the first time that the US was not winning in Iraq. “The problem is the larger issue of US policy in Iraq, and recent polls that show that President Bush has very, very little political capital left on Iraq,” said Eric Davis, professor of political science at Middlebury College, Vermont.
It is a shattered Iraq which enters the new year, after the insurgency that erupted after the 2003 invasion escalated into brutal sectarian war, forcing Bush to contemplate a major policy shift to prevent Iraq’s disintegration.
“We’re not winning, we’re not losing,” Bush admitted last week, reversing years of upbeat predictions about his multibillion-dollar military venture.
The president spent Christmas at his rural Camp David retreat before going down to his Crawford, Texas ranch, for a period of soul-searching on Iraq, and is expected to unveil a new strategy shift in the new year.
Since the US-led invasion that removed Saddam, just 17 months after US-led troops invaded Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Iraqis have perished.
Sixteen people were killed and 70 wounded in the Iraqi capital yesterday when a triple car bombing tore through a main avenue in the largely Shiite neighborhood of Bayiha, security and medical sources said.
The bombs packed into three vehicles exploded within minutes of each other at a time when the boulevard is normally bustling with people in morning business hours, as another bomb exploded in a downtown market killing four.
In the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, three Iraqi children were killed and eight wounded when they were blown up by a roadside bomb on their way to school, said police Capt. Imad Jassim.
All the casualties were under the age of 12, Jassim said, in the latest attack in Kirkuk, which sits on massive, under-developed oil reserves and has a volatile ethnic and sectarian mix of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen.
Eleven people were wounded by a car bomb that exploded in Al-Tamain near Baiji in northern Iraq, according to Capt. Sadun Nuri of the Baiji police.
Building effective Iraqi security is now the key challenge facing both the Baghdad government and the US-led coalition.
Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s government has drawn up a plan to transfer security responsibility in Baghdad to Iraqis while positioning US forces on the outskirts of the city to keep out suicide bombers and insurgents.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has also instructed the top US commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, to work out specifics of a plan to help restore security in Baghdad with Iraqis in the lead and US forces in a supporting role.
