A string of car bombings in quick succession killed at least 17 people in a Shi’ite district of Baghdad, as two top United States officials insisted the insurgency was under pressure.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari on Thursday opened a high-profile visit to Washington aimed at soothing US worries about the war, meeting top US officials a day before talks with US President George W Bush.
US Vice President Dick Cheney repeated comments made earlier in an interview with CNN that the insurgency was ”in its last throes,” as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to set a deadline for a troop withdrawal but said the United States was winning the war.
And several top US officials and military also charged that Syria knows full well foreign fighters are transiting from the Arabian peninsula and North Africa through Damascus and into Iraq — and may even be complicit.
The Syrians, ”at a minimum are tolerating it,” Rumsfeld said.
In London, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also demanded at a Group of Eight meeting that Syria stop insurgents from crossing its border.
General Richard Myers, the chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General John Abizaid, the commander of US forces in the Middle East, made similar remarks in daylong testimony before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.
Earlier, Syria’s Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara promised his country would cooperate more with Iraq on border security.
Iraq’s early-morning violence on Thursday came a day after some 80 countries pledged support for the new Iraq at a conference in Brussels and US forces announced the end of an operation against insurgents near the Syrian border.
A similar spate of bombings in another Shi’ite district of Baghdad late on Wednesday killed 18 people.
Iraq’s most wanted man Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said in a purported internet statement that an al-Qaeda militant on Saudi Arabia’s most-wanted list had been killed in fighting with US forces on the border.
In the first attack on Thursday, a car blew up outside a Shi’ite mosque in a densely populated district of Karradah, and shortly afterwards a suicide car bomber blew himself up in front of a police patrol near a petrol station.
Minutes later a third car bomb blew up outside a hammam, a male bath complex, and a fourth exploded outside another mosque in Karradah but caused only damage.
Karradah was turned into a virtual war zone with rows of shop fronts reduced to heaps of concrete and twisted metal. Several cars were on fire and smoke rose from buildings as residents fanned out on the streets.
North of Baghdad, three Iraqis, including two soldiers, were killed when a suicide bomber driving a tractor blew himself up against a military convoy in the village of Albuzayla.
And a car bomb aimed at a US military convoy killed one Iraqi and wounded 10 others in the town of Tuz Khurmatu, security sources said.
In an appearance in Congress, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured lawmakers that US troops were defeating the stubborn insurgency in Iraq and rejected calls that the Pentagon scale back the military presence in Iraq.
”Any who say that we’ve lost this war, or that we’re losing this war, are wrong. We are not,” said Rumsfeld.
On Congress’ proposals to set deadlines for a withdrawal, Rumsfeld rejected the idea as counterproductive to US military objectives, saying it would only embolden US enemies.
Cheney — talking to CNN — offered a pugnacious defence of the war effort, refusing to take back his remark last month that the insurgency was in its ”last throes.”
”The point would be that the conflict will be intense, but it’s intense because the terrorists understand if we’re successful at accomplishing our objective, standing up a democracy in Iraq, that that’s a huge defeat for them,” he said, after giving a definition of ”last throes”.
Prime Minister Jaafari, speaking at the Council for Foreign Relations think tank in Washington, said dramatic progress has been made in cutting the number of insurgent attacks as he sought to calm mounting worries in the United States.
Jaafari said that since the transitional government had taken power in March, thousands of ”terrorists” had been detained and the number of daily car bombs was a fraction of the number before.
He said the daily average had dropped from 12-14 to less than one.
”The general trend is very much a downward,” Jaafari said.
The US military announced on Wednesday the end of a five-day operation against insurgents in the town of Karabilah near the Syrian border which involved air strikes and about 1 000 Iraqi soldiers and US marines.
It said 47 insurgents were killed and one suspect detained.
US troops are continuing to battle insurgents in the vast western province whose borders straddle Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
A Pew Global Attitudes survey also showed negative attitudes around the world toward the United States, with antipathy expressed toward US President George W Bush, largely over the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In predominantly Muslim countries, including Nato ally Turkey, antagonism toward the United States runs so deep that most respondents said it would be good if China emerged as a military power to challenge the United States, the survey found.-Sapa-AFP