WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD, 16 March 2007 — Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi told US President George W. Bush yesterday that the Baghdad crackdown is doing “better than expected” but will not by itself end Iraq’s sectarian strife. “We are working hard together. Our security plan is marking some points. We are not finished, but we are doing better than expected in this plan,” Mahdi told Bush as they met in the Oval Office.
“This will not solve the whole problem; the reconciliation process will take our political agenda forward. We are working on many issues,” said Mahdi. The vice president cited an oil-and-gas revenue-sharing measure, legislation to guide the return of some former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party purged from many jobs in government and other Iraq sectors.
The two leaders met amid a US-led security crackdown in Baghdad that aims to break the cycle of sectarian violence that the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies say bears the hallmarks of civil war.
Meanwhile, car bombs and shootings claimed 26 lives in Iraq yesterday and the US military announced the deaths of five more troops, as Britain’s Tony Blair asserted the country is not in the grip of civil war.
Eight people died and 25 were wounded when a suicide bomber rammed his car into a joint Iraqi military and police checkpoint in central Baghdad’s Kharmana Square, security officials said.
A soldier and a civilian died when another checkpoint was attacked by a suicide car bomber in Baghdad’s southwestern Yarmuk district, the officials said.
In another attack, five workers were killed and two dozen hurt when a bomb on a bus exploded at the entrance to a factory in Iskandiriyah, 50 kilometers south of Baghdad, as employees arrived for work.
Seven people were also reported killed around the restive city of Baquba, north of Baghdad, five of them shot dead by gunmen who attacked a series of gas stations and set them on fire, police said. Elsewhere, four more Iraqis were killed, while the US military announced the deaths of another five US troops. One soldier, it said, was killed on Wednesday while on combat duty in the western Sunni province of Anbar and a Marine died in the same province in a noncombat incident the same day.
Another three soldiers were killed and nine wounded in blasts and battles in central Diyala province of which Baquba is the capital, where reinforcements were sent this week as part of a US troop “surge” to quell sectarian violence in Baghdad and surrounding areas.
In another development, an Iraqi appeals court yesterday confirmed the death sentence on Taha Yassin Ramadan, former vice president to Saddam Hussein, for crimes against humanity. Ramadan, who was born in 1938, is likely to be hanged by the end of this month, a senior Iraqi official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
He was sentenced on Feb. 12 by the Iraqi High Tribunal, which is trying former regime officials, for his role in the slaughter of 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail in the 1980s. His sentence was automatically reviewed by the appeals panel, which confirmed the execution by hanging.
