Kurdish security forces reported on Thursday foiling a major bomb plot with 1,2 tonnes of explosives hidden in three rubbish skips, including one left on a key bridge of northern Iraq oil centre Kirkuk.
The discovery, a day after three suspected Islamist militants were arrested carrying explosives-packed suitcases, added new urgency to United States efforts to boost security forces to counter what officials call a growing terrorist threat.
With US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flying into the Middle East to confer with US commanders and civilians, US officials pressed for creation of a US-led international force for Iraq while speeding the formation of a local police force.
Kurdish security officials highlighted how dangerous Iraq had become in describing the alleged plans of three men arrested on Wednesday as suspected members of Ansar al-Islam, a shadowy group linked by Washington to al-Qaeda.
”The three confessed to packing three rubbish skips with 1 200kg of explosives surrounded by metal fragments,” a senior investigator said on Thursday.
”The first was intended to destroy the Third Bridge of Kirkuk. The other two, found mounted on lorries, were intended for a bombing in a Kirkuk public square and an assassination attempt against Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK] leader Jalal Talabani in Sulaimaniya.”
The investigator said the attempted bombing campaign was linked to two massive car bombs which killed 22 people at the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad last month and 83 people in the Shiite pilgrimage city of Najaf last Friday.
”There is a huge terrorist network operating with them, which is connected to the bombings in Najaf and at UN headquarters in Baghdad,” he said. ”If these bombings had succeeded, they would have been on the same scale.”
But he said the PUK forces that control Kirkuk did not intend to hand over the suspects to the Americans ”until the investigation has been completed and we have arrested all their accomplices.”
The trio were picked up on Wednesday apparently on their way to carry out attacks against the headquarters of Iraq’s Northern Oil Company and the city’s crowded central market.
The spate of bombings and daily attacks on occupying troops has alarmed the US-led coalition that overthrew Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in April but is now worried that the 140 000 American troops are not enough to tame the country.
Such concern has prompted a Washington to seek a UN resolution establishing an international force under US control, a move once resisted by hardliners in the administration of President George Bush.
Rumsfeld insisted at the start of his unannounced visit to the region that US commanders believed the 140 000 US troops now in Iraq were sufficient.
”Should the total number go up for security? Yes, I think so, but I think it’s going to be on the Iraqi side and on the international side more than the US side,” he said.
He said ”maybe another division” might be necessary but added most of the security requirements would have to come from increasing the size of the Iraqi army and police.
The nascent Iraqi police force graduated another crop of officers on Thursday, with about 250 completing the third edition of a training programme overseen by the San Diego, California-based 382nd Law and Order Detachment.
The ceremony came two days after a car bomb exploded at a police station in Baghdad’s main police compound, killing one policeman, wounding 21 others and serving notice on the risk run by police recruits.
Paul Bremer, the US overseer in Iraq, vowed on Tuesday to swiftly boost police numbers from their current strength of just under 40 000 to between 65 000 and 70 000, reducing the normal three-month training course to eight weeks.
”We would like to do that as fast as we can consistent with their being properly trained, trained in police training and in human rights,” Bremer told reporters.
He said three battalions had been recruited for an Iraqi civil defence corps, about 2 500 border personnel had been signed up and one battalion of the new Iraqi army was in training. Overall, he said, nearly 60 000 Iraqis were currently in uniform. — Sapa-AFP