Insurgents killed at least 20 people in three separate attacks targeting Iraqi security forces in Baghdad on Thursday, including one by a man who set off hidden explosives while waiting in line outside an army recruitment centre, police said.
A similar attack Wednesday by a suicide bomber standing in line outside a police recruitment centre in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil killed 60 Iraqis and wounded 150.
The attacks are part of an escalation of violence aimed at destabilising Iraq’s new democratic government. The insurgents often target Iraqi security forces, which are being recruited and trained by the United States-led coalition as part of its eventual exit strategy.
By Monday, at least 616 Iraqi police had been killed this year, according to statistics compiled by the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.
The violence has left Iraq’s brand new government grappling with how to deal with an insurgency seemingly bent on escalating attacks.
The new Shi’ite Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, had hoped to draw support away from the insurgency by including in his Cabinet members of the disaffected Sunni Arab minority, which dominated under Saddam Hussein. But members of his Shi’ite-dominated alliance have blocked candidates with links to Saddam’s regime, which brutally repressed Shi’ites and Kurds.
Al-Jaafari’s’ 37-member Cabinet, most of which was sworn in on Tuesday, includes just four Sunni ministers in relatively minor posts. Months after Iraq’s landmark parliamentary elections on January 30, bickering continued over two empty deputy prime minister’s slots and five portfolios that are in temporary hands, including defence.
On Thursday, lawmakers from al-Jaafari’s United Iraqi alliance said there was agreement on who would fill the key oil and electricity slots, which are destined for Shi’ites.
Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, the first oil minister in the former US-appointed governing council, will return to the position, said Ali al-Dabagh, a Shi’ite lawmaker involved in the negotiations.
Former Pentagon favourite Ahmad Chalabi, a Shi’ite deputy prime minister in the new government, has been filling in as oil minister. His office could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mihsin Shlash, an independent Shi’ite lawmaker, will be electricity minister, al-Dabagh and two other lawmakers said.
Al-Jaafari was in a Cabinet meeting on Thursday morning and it was not immediately possible to confirm the appointments with his office. President Jalal Talabani and his two vice presidents must sign off on the names before they go to the 275-member National Assembly for a vote.
In Thursday’s worst violence, a man carrying hidden explosives set them off while standing in a long line of job applicants outside an Iraqi army recruitment office in central Baghdad, police said. At least 11 people were killed and six wounded in the attack, police and hospital officials said.
Insurgents have typically attacked such centres with car bombs and many are now protected by high blast walls. But witnesses said this attacker walked past a high concrete wall topped with barbed wire to the entrance and detonated his explosives.
”While we were standing in line, a man walked past, right up to the heavily guarded entrance gate, as if he wanted to ask the guards a question,” said Anwar Wasfi, who was standing near the end of the line.
”Suddenly, an explosion occurred, and I was knocked over,” Wasfi said at Yarmouk Hospital, where he was being treated for leg and arm wounds.
The US military said it could not immediately confirm the attack, which was reported less than one kilometre from the heavily fortified Green Zone, home to the Iraqi government, foreign embassies and US forces.
In western Baghdad, insurgents attacked two police patrols, killing a total of nine officers.
In the first attack, gunmen fired on a patrol in the Amil area, killing eight policemen and wounding two, said police Major Mousa Abdul Karim. About 15 minutes later, a suicide car bomb exploded near four police cars in nearby Ghazaliyah, killing one officer and wounding six, he said.
Another suicide car bomber hit a US military convoy in Baghdad’s southern Dora neighbourhood, destroying one large truck but causing no American casualties, the military said.
Skid marks at the scene and the location of the vehicles suggested the attacker had raced onto the highway from a side road, exploding his vehicle near the front of the truck and setting it on fire.
In another part of Dora on Wednesday night, a suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint, killing at least nine soldiers and wounding 16, including 10 civilians, police said.
Wednesday’s brutal attack in Irbil, 346km north of Baghdad, was the deadliest one in Iraq since February 28, when a suicide car bomber struck a crowd of police and national guard recruits in Hillah, south of Iraq’s capital, killing 125 and wounding more than 140.
The Irbil tragedy left pieces of flesh spattered on the wall and pools of blood in the street outside the police recruitment centre.
Nails and shards of metal were packed in with the explosives to maximise casualties.
About 250 job seekers were waiting to be searched outside the centre when the bomb went off, said police Captain Othman Aziz. An Iraqi insurgent joined the line and detonated explosives concealed on his body, he said.
The northern Kurdish areas have been spared much of the worst of the violence, in part because members of the Sunni Arab minority believed to be driving the insurgency stand out and are closely watched.
A Sunni militant group, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack, saying in a statement posted on the internet that it was revenge for Kurdish cooperation with US forces. The statement described the attack as a car bombing, but there was no crater in the street, as would be expected in such a case.
Ansar al-Sunnah is believed to be a breakaway faction of Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish-led group with links to al-Qaeda. It has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks against Iraqi security forces and twin suicide bombings targeting Kurds in Irbil that killed 109 people in 2004. ‒ Sapa-AP