BAGHDAD, 8 June 2007 — Bombers struck in Baghdad and at a police headquarters in a northern Iraqi border town yesterday, killing 19 people, and gunmen shot a reporter in the latest attack targeting Iraqi journalists.
In the worst violence, a suicide bomber driving a truck packed with explosives rammed a police headquarters and adjoining municipal building in the northern town of Rabea, near the Syrian border, killing nine people, police said.
The attack, which also wounded 22 people, including five British civilian contractors, largely destroyed both buildings, police said. The town is northwest of Mosul, where US military commanders blame Sunni Arab insurgents and criminals for stoking much of the violence. Iraqi security officials, however, say Shiite and Kurdish militias are also involved.
In Mosul, gunmen shot dead Sahar Al-Haideri, a journalist working for the independent Aswat Al-Iraqi news agency. She was the second staff member to be killed in just over a week.
The agency said the married mother of three had been on a “death list” issued by an Al-Qaeda-led group. Journalists have been dying in record numbers in Iraq, with at least 12 killed in May, the highest monthly total since the start of the US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 105 journalists have been killed since 2003. Journalists are increasingly finding themselves caught in the crossfire in Iraq’s sectarian conflict and Sunni Arab-led insurgency against US forces and the Iraqi government.
In Baghdad, where US and Iraqi troops have launched a major crackdown to stem sectarian violence, a car bomb killed five people and wounded 15 near a restaurant in Sadr City, police said. Sadr City is a stronghold of Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia.
Two suicide car bombers also hit an Iraqi army checkpoint in the western Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, killing five people. Shiite and Sunni gunmen clashed in the Sunni district of Saidiya in the south of the capital. Witnesses said the Sunni fighters were trying to stop an incursion by Mehdi Army militiamen from an adjoining Shiite neighborhood.
The gunmen were shooting at each other across a highway and mortar bombs were reported to be falling in the area around the district’s main Sunni mosque. A source at Yarmouk Hospital said one person had been killed and seven wounded.
