FALLUJAH, Iraq, 20 April 2007 — US Defense Secretary Robert Gates flew into Iraq for talks with US commanders yesterday after bombers killed more than 200 people in a savage blow to a US-backed security plan.
Embarking on his third visit to Iraq since taking office late last year, Gates arrived in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah by helicopter on a previously unannounced leg of his latest Middle East tour. A few hours after his arrival, the US military announced the deaths of three more soldiers in Iraq taking its losses since the March 2003 invasion to 3,313, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
Gates swept straight into talks with US commanders in the town in the deeply troubled western Sunni Arab province of Al-Anbar, where US forces battle Al-Qaeda-linked militants daily.
In Baghdad, one day after the deadliest single car bomb attack on civilians of the four-year-old war, mourners and Iraqi politicians slammed the US-backed security plan for failing to halt the carnage.
“We have anticipated from the very beginning ... that the insurgency and others would increase the violence to make the people of Iraq believe the plan is a failure,” Gates said in Israel before flying into Iraq.
“We intend to persist to show that it is not.” Gates’ plan hinges on a controversial troop “surge” ordered by US President George W. Bush in a bid to turn around the Iraq war.
But the deployment of 80,000 Iraqi and US troops has failed to stop a torrent of bombings from terrorizing the capital’s population of five million. The latest attack saw a suicide car bomber kill 12 people outside a Baghdad take-away shop in the central Jadriyah district — majority Shiite — and set ablaze a nearby truck loaded with gas cylinders.
Five more people were killed elsewhere in Iraq yesterday. The new bloodshed came after a horrific blitz on Wednesday that slaughtered 190 people, including 140 in a single blast in one marketplace, the deadliest single such attack since the US-led invasion four years ago.
It was the highest single-day death toll since Nov. 23 when 202 people were massacred in a similar blitz in the Shiite slum of Sadr City.
Yesterday’s blast ripped through civilians outside the popular Hassan eatery, where students had stopped to buy lunch, said a police colonel scrambled to the scene.
He counted eight bodies after the attack, most of them students, but declined to give his name. The explosives gutted three cars, leaving hulks of charred metal and pieces of human flesh across the pavement outside the kebab and shawarma shop and a next door drinks and ice-cream outlet.
The Defense Ministry official said two police were killed in the attack, and four more officers wounded. A police checkpoint was positioned down a road opposite the Hassan, near outlying Interior Ministry offices in the district. Angry and despairing Iraqis hunted for their dead relatives in city mortuaries after the Sadriyah market blast ripped apart shoppers and commuters.
“Oh God, why all that!” sobbed one male relative, scanning frozen corpses stacked up in the Imam Ali Hospital in Sadr City after a night-time curfew was lifted. Around 200 anguished relatives choked back tears and anger as they swarmed past him, frantically trying to distinguish loved ones in a grotesque pile of charred bodies, many burned beyond recognition.
For many, a ring, tattered remains of clothes ripped to shreds in the blast or their teeth was all there was to pick out their nearest and dearest. Wednesday’s attacks delivered a savage blow to the credibility of the US crackdown.
