BAGHDAD, 24 April 2007 — A string of bomb attacks in Iraq yesterday killed more than 20 people and wounded dozens of others, as US and Iraqi officials defended the building of a wall around a Sunni enclave in Baghdad. Hundreds of Sunnis held a protest in Baghdad yesterday to oppose the barrier.
Standing outside a mosque in their area of Adhamiyah, which is surrounded by three mostly Shiite neighborhoods, the more than 2,000 demonstrators shouted slogans and carried posters saying the concrete barrier being built by US forces would make them prisoners of their own neighborhoods and an easier target for terrorists.
“The people of Adhamiyah reject turning Baghdad into a new Green Zone,” the protesters shouted. Carrying banners with slogans such as “No to the sectarian wall” and “Adhamiyah children want to see Baghdad without walls,” the protesters marched from the mosque to a nearby former Iraqi police station that now houses an outpost of US soldiers.
A car bomb near an office of a Kurdish political party in a mainly Christian village in northern Iraq killed at least 10 people and wounded 20, party spokesman Abdul Gani Ali told AFP. The apparent target was the office of Kurdish leader Massud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party in the village of Tal Isquf, north of Mosul.
Witnesses said a car loaded with explosives was parked between the party office and a social club in the village, and that some of the victims were thought to be Kurdish “Peshmerga” fighters.
Bomb attacks also continued to ravage the capital Baghdad, the epicenter of a campaign by Al-Qaeda militants to undermine Iraq’s Shiite-led government and to foment sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites.
A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Al-Yasmin restaurant near the capital’s fortified Green Zone, killing seven people and wounding 14, a security official said.
Iraqi and US officials defended their decision to construct a five-kilometer wall around Baghdad’s dangerous Sunni district of Adhamiyah, even though Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki has criticized the project.
The new US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, used his first press conference since arriving in Baghdad last month to insist that the concrete wall was not intended to segregate the city’s warring Sunni and Shiite communities.
“I think it’s important ... that one not lose sight of the threat that is motivating some of the decisions that have been made,” Crocker said. “The intention in Adhamiyah is clearly not to segregate communities nor to engage in a form of political or social engineering,” he continued.
