BAGHDAD, 28 February 2007 — Bombers slaughtered 18 Iraqi children playing football yesterday as a relentless bombing spree snuffed out dozens more lives and a US spy chief acknowledged that the crisis amounts to “civil war.” The children, aged between 10 and 15, died when a car parked next to a football pitch in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi exploded while they were playing, an Iraqi defense official told AFP.
Around 20 more children were wounded in the latest attack in the restive western city, a hotbed of the anti-US insurgency, which is fast also becoming a battlefront between rival Sunni factions, the official said.
In another bloody bomb attack, a suicide bomber rammed a truck into the Sheikh Fathi police station in the main northern city of Mosul and detonated explosives, killing at least six policemen, police said. A spate of bomb and mortar attacks in and around Baghdad killed 16 more people, including two civilians who died when a hidden bomb ripped through a budget restaurant frequented by Shiite laborers. The US military also suffered losses, with three soldiers were killed yesterday by a roadside bomb as they carried out a mission outside Baghdad.
Meanwhile, police were investigating how a bomb was detonated inside the Public Works Ministry on Monday, killing five officials and lightly wounding Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi. “Thirty-five employees of the Public Works Ministry are now under interrogation by the Interior Ministry about how the bomb was brought into the building,” an official told AFP.
“Most of them are bodyguards and ministry security men,” he said, adding that those wounded in the explosion will be questioned once they recover. The attack came as the US-led security plan struggled to halt the vicious sectarian carnage between Sunni and Shiite armed groups in Baghdad, which has seen a surge in bomb and mortar attacks since Saturday.
