BAGHDAD, 3 August 2007 — A suicide car bomber slammed into an Iraqi police station northeast of Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 13 people, police said. Most of the victims were policemen and recruits lining up outside the station in Hibhib, the same small Sunni town near Baquba where Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was killed in a US airstrike more than a year ago.
The area is considered a stronghold of both Al-Qaeda-linked militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists. Fifteen others were wounded in the attack, a police officer said on condition of anonymity out of security concerns. The US military announced three more soldier deaths: two killed in a mortar or rocket attack Tuesday, and another killed by a roadside bomb Wednesday.
And in Kirkuk, police yesterday found a weeping eight-year-old boy next to the bodies of his four brothers, building laborers who had been kidnapped and murdered while working on a new police station. Col. Firas Abdullah, police chief in the northern town of Al-Rashaad, said the brothers were traveling home after work on Wednesday when their car was halted by gunmen around 30 kilometers south of Kirkuk.
Officers found the five at around 1230 GMT the next day. The adult brothers had been shot in the head and killed, but young Salah Abdullah Hussein had been abandoned next to their corpses and was in shock. “This is a real tragedy. These were all men from the same household,” said Abdullah, adding that the victims were originally from Mosul but had moved to Kirkuk after being threatened while working on another government project.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s party asked the country’s largest Sunni Arab bloc to reconsider its withdrawal from government, in a last-ditch effort to restore Iraq’s national unity government. All six Cabinet ministers from the Iraqi Concord Front quit Maliki’s regime a day earlier to protest what they called the prime minister’s failure to respond to a set of demands.
Among them were the release of security detainees not charged with specific crimes, the disbanding of militias and the participation of all groups represented in the government in dealing with security issues. Their resignation left only two Sunnis in the 40-member Cabinet, undermining efforts to pull together rival factions and pass reconciliation laws the US considers benchmarks toward healing the country’s deep war wounds.
Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party issued a statement yesterday calling on the Front to “reconsider its decision.” “The party expresses its concern and regret about this setback for Iraqi politics, an action taken before exploring any dialogue.”
But a Front lawmaker, reacting to the Dawa statement, said yesterday that the bloc would reconsider its withdrawal only if promised “the priority of real partnership.” “If we were assured by tangible and concrete promises of real change ... and the priority of real partnership, we would reconsider our stance,” Salim Abdullah, a Sunni Parliament member, told The Associated Press. But he added that he was not optimistic such assurances would come from Maliki.
In a videoconference late Wednesday, US President George W. Bush prodded Maliki to unite rival factions and show some overdue political progress, the White House said.
The two leaders spoke for 45 minutes on a secure video link, part of a regular series of conversations on the war and Iraq’s struggling democracy.
Iraqi troops killed a local Al-Qaeda warlord and US soldiers arrested two of the extremist network’s chieftains as a suicide car bomber struck police in one of the group’s strongholds yesterday.
Al-Qaeda crackdowns were announced after a series of car bombings killed more than 80 people in Baghdad on Wednesday, which served as a bloody backdrop to mounting political crisis in Iraq’s shrinking coalition government.
A militant known as Safi, touted as Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s emir of Mosul, was killed in a shootout with Iraqi soldiers on Wednesday after he and two cohorts were spotted driving in the country’s third largest city, the US military said.
An Iraqi unit gave chase and halted the vehicle. Safi and his bodyguards jumped out and opened fire. Iraqi troops returned fire and the three members of the Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate were killed, the US military said.
American forces also announced the arrest of two other alleged Al-Qaeda in Iraq emirs during operations targeting senior leaders and propaganda cells in the terror network on Wednesday and yesterday.
They said they captured the alleged Al-Qaeda “sniper emir,” whom they suspect was involved in a plot against the mayor of Mosul last March and has allegedly claimed the killing of at least one US-led coalition soldier.
More than 1,000 Iraqi troops backed by US paratroopers yesterday launched an operation to expel Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate from Samarra, two months after it was accused of attacking a revered Shiite shrine there, the military said.
US troops called in an airstrike near the largely Sunni town killing a foreigner poised to attack coalition forces, according to the military.
