/ 4 May 2006

Suicide bomber strikes at Baghdad court building

A suicide bomber attacked a crowd of people waiting outside a heavily guarded court building in Baghdad on Thursday, killing 10 Iraqis and wounding 52, police said. Two United States soldiers also died in a roadside bomb attack.

Police first said the attack near the court was caused by a car bomb targeting a police convoy, but later said it was caused by a man with explosives hidden beneath his clothing.

The man set them off in a crowd of police officers and civilians waiting outside the civil court, said police Lieutenant Thair Mahmoud. The officers were guarding the building and many of the civilians were meeting just outside it with paralegals writing the petitions the civilians planned to submit to the court.

The blast occurred at 9.45am local time on Palestine Street, a major road in a mixed Sunni-Shi’ite area of eastern Baghdad. It was powerful enough to smash the windows of some nearby shops.

Firefighters in yellow helmets rushed to the scene and were using hoses to clean blood stains from the sidewalk and street outside the court. Mahmoud said all the casualties were civilians, except for two wounded police officers.

The roadside bomb that killed the two US Army soldiers exploded at about 11.45am local time in south-central Baghdad, the military said.

The attack raised to at least 2 409 the number of members of the US military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Shootings in Baghdad and other areas also killed six Iraqis, including a Shi’ite tribal leader and an Iraqi army officer.

Air raid

In Ramadi, police Lieutenant Ahmed al-Dulaimi and Dr Ali al-Obeidi at Ramadi General hospital said US aircraft bombed two houses, killing 13 Iraqis and wounding four. But the US military said it had information about such an attack in Ramadi, 115km west of Baghdad.

US Army Sergeant Dan Schonborg, of the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, said no coalition aircraft launched bombing runs in Ramadi on Thursday. ”It’s counter-information operations. They’re saying we did this, when in actuality it’s not the case,” Schonborg said of the insurgents.

US officers said there were sporadic exchanges of fire in Ramadi on Thursday, and two Iraqi soldiers were wounded.

Ramadi, populated by Sunni Arabs, is the most dangerous city in Iraq for US forces. Commanders say there are more insurgent attacks there than anywhere else in the country, with militants and American troops exchanging fire several times a day — at least.

On Wednesday, the corpses of 43 Iraqis were found in the streets of Baghdad and other cities, according to the interior ministry. They were apparent victims of death squads that kidnap civilians of rival Muslim sects, torture them, and dump their bodies.

Targeted murders

Lately, Iraq’s violence has shifted mainly from attacks by insurgents on US and Iraqi forces to carefully targeted murders of Iraqi. Such sectarian violence by death squads targeting Shi’ite and Sunni civilians sharply increased after the February 22 bombing of a Shi’ite shrine in Samarra, a city 95km north of Baghdad.

Sunni-led insurgents also have been boldly attacking fellow Sunnis who cooperate with the US-backed Iraqi government by joining Iraq’s military or its police forces.

On Wednesday, a suicide bomber cloaked in explosives killed two police officers and 13 police recruits gathered in Fallujah, a city surrounded by US Marine checkpoints. In a nearby town, three newly recruited Sunni soldiers from the US-trained Iraqi army were found slain.

The suicide attack outside the main police station in Fallujah occurred a day after the governor of Anbar province, which includes Fallujah, narrowly escaped assassination. A suicide bomber exploded his vehicle near Maamoun Sami Rashid al-Alwani’s convoy in Ramadi, killing 10 people. The governor was not injured, US officials said.

US and Iraqi officials have been urging Sunni Arabs to join the police and army, which has been dominated by the rival Shi’ite Muslim sect and ethnic Kurds. Sunni community leaders say the presence of Shi’ite and Kurdish troops in their areas raises sectarian tensions and undermines confidence in the government.

Training and recruiting Sunni Arab police and soldiers is part of a broader strategy by US and Iraqi authorities to establish a political role for selected Sunni insurgent groups. The goal is to split more moderate elements from Saddam Hussein’s fanatic loyalists and extremists such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Meanwhile, the formation of Iraq’s new government continues. Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi’ite, has said he intends to finish appointing his Cabinet by late next week.

To do that, he must balance the demands of the country’s religiously and ethnically based parties for key posts, including the ministries of oil, defence and the interior.

Ensuring all groups a stake in the new government may require the Shi’ites, who hold 130 of the 275 seats in Parliament, to give minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds more posts than they would expect based on their showing in the December 15 legislative elections. — Sapa-AP

Associated Press correspondent Todd Pitman contributed to this report from Ramadi