BAGHDAD, 7 June 2007 — Car bombings shook the streets leading to Baghdad’s most revered Shiite shrine yesterday, and police reported at least seven people killed and 27 others wounded. The simultaneous blasts at two key intersections in the Kazimiyah district were the latest blows in an unending series of apparent attacks by Sunni extremists bent on terrorizing Iraq’s Shiite majority and inflaming hostilities between the two sects.
Northeast of Baghdad, in several sections of the violence-wracked city of Baqouba, Iraqi troops and US helicopter gunships were reported attacking Sunni militants of the group Al-Qaeda in Iraq. A medical source said the bodies of eight gunmen were brought to the hospital. The US military said it was looking into the report. Elsewhere, assassins killed a police official and an aide to Iraq’s pre-eminent Shiite cleric.
The new bloodshed came a day after followers of anti-American Moqtada Sadr pushed through a resolution in Iraq’s Parliament requiring the Baghdad government to obtain Parliament’s approval for future extensions of the UN mandate for US-led forces in Iraq.
The current mandate doesn’t expire until Dec. 31, but Tuesday’s action added to the debate — in Baghdad and Washington — over whether and when US troops should be pulled out. The American ambassador here contended that things “could get very much worse” without the US presence.
“I don’t see an end game, as it were, in sight,” Ryan Crocker said in an interview aired yesterday on US National Public Radio. “And that is why I get a little bit concerned when Americans talk about, well, we have got a couple of more months, and then we have to make final decisions.”
The last of five brigades scheduled to reinforce US troops in Baghdad and surroundings will arrive in the “next couple of weeks,” but it may take up to 60 days for it to fully establish itself, US command spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner told reporters yesterday. The brigades are the key element of a “surge” of 30,000 US troops that began arriving in February to try to restore order to central Iraq.
In one of yesterday morning’s bombings, a parked car exploded at Al-Zahraa Square, an intersection one kilometer from the large, golden-domed Kazimiyah shrine, in an area of closely packed homes and shops that is largely controlled by Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.
Witness Hussein Alwan, 50, a bakery shop owner, said there were no police or troops nearby to be targeted, “just civilians.” “We rushed over and saw people dead or injured in burning cars, and we tried to save them while waiting for the firemen and ambulances,” he said.
The second explosion, also of an unoccupied vehicle, occurred at the Aden intersection, at the western entrance to the Kazimiyah quarter. Police, meanwhile, found and disabled a third car bomb on a Kazimiyah shopping street, said an officer at the Interior Ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Iraqi and US troops yesterday were deployed along the city’s main streets as US helicopter gunships fired on what were described as Al-Qaeda strongholds in four Baqouba districts, police said. At Baqouba hospital, a medical source said the bodies of eight unidentified gunmen had been brought in.
In southern Iraq, three gunmen in a speeding automobile shot and killed a junior aide to the country’s pre-eminent Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, police and a member of the ayatollah’s office.
Sheikh Raheem Al-Hasnawi, Sistani’s representative in the Al-Mishkhab area, 35 kilometers south of the southern Shiite shrine city of Najaf, was killed around 11 p.m. Tuesday near his home on the north side of Najaf, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.
In the city of Beiji, 250 kilometers north of Baghdad, Maj. Enad Khattab, a Beiji police director, was shot dead along with his brother at about 10 p.m. Tuesday as they drove in central Beiji, a local police officer reported. He spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns.
