Three Iraqis were killed and 15 people wounded, including two Australian soldiers, when a car bomb exploded on Monday near an Australian army convoy and a local school in Baghdad, officials said.
At about the same time, two United States patrols were targeted in roadside bombs that caused no casualties but damaged one army vehicle, the military said.
US-led troops in Iraq come under daily attack from a determined insurgency that bred in the aftermath of last year’s war to topple Saddam Hussein.
In the latest attacks, a vehicle was detonated by remote control as an Australian convoy drove towards the heavily fortified Green Zone that houses Iraq’s seat of government, said US Major Scot Stanger, citing witnesses.
An Australian Foreign Ministry spokesperson confirmed that a bomb had exploded close to the Australian embassy in Baghdad.
”We understand a military convoy was involved,” she said by telephone from Canberra. The spokesperson, however, attributed the blast to a roadside bomb.
Australia, along with Britain and the US, was a founding member of the coalition that led the invasion of Iraq.
Stanger said no diplomats had been travelling in the convoy.
”It was only a military convoy trying to get to checkpoint 11 near the bridge,” Stanger said, referring to a southern entrance to the Green Zone.
An AFP reporter at the scene saw a damaged army vehicle, with its tyres flattened by the force of the blast that rocked the Karrada district of Baghdad at about 8am local time.
Local hospitals said 13 Iraqi civilians, including four young children aged between four and eight, were brought in with injuries and ambulances were seen rushing to and from the blast site, ferrying away casualties.
In an all-too-common scene of chaos, US soldiers cordoned off the area, where hundreds of local people had gathered to try to glimpse what was going on.
”Warning, warning!” US soldiers shouted through a loudspeaker. ”A criminal group has blown up a suicide car bomb against the multinational forces causing civilian casualties … please go back, there might be secondary explosives.”
The blast sent a mushroom cloud of smoke into the air where two US helicopters had been buzzing nearby.
Suicide bombers penetrated the fortress-like Green Zone on October 14, killing at least five people, including three American civilians when they detonated their charges close to a popular café.
Two car bombs rock Mosul
Meanwhile, two car bombs rocked Iraq’s northern city of Mosul on Monday, with one person killed in an attack on a local government building and two security guards wounded in a separate incident, officials said.
”A car bomb exploded at about 11am in the garage of the governorate building … one person died,” said Hazem Gallauwi, spokesperson for the governor of Nineveh province. The identity of the victim was not immediately clear.
About 20 minutes later, a second car bomb targeted a member of an Iraqi liaison office with the US-led military, a security official said.
”A car bomb exploded in the path of a convoy for General Motaz Faqaa, a member of the liaison committee in the Andalous district [northern Mosul] at 11.20am,” said Lieutenant Colonel Fadel Mohammed Abdelsatter, another security guard.
”Two guards were injured, but General Faqaa was unharmed,” he said.
The same Iraqi official escaped another attack four months ago, security sources in Iraq’s main northern city said.
Mosul, 370km north of Baghdad, is a frequent scene of attacks and assassinations against Iraq’s newborn security forces, political figures and members of the US-led military. — Sapa-AFP
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