A suicide bomber blew himself up inside a minibus full of Iraqi army recruits in Baghdad on Monday, killing 13 people and wounding seven, police said.
Police said the bomber boarded the minibus outside the Muthanna base in central Baghdad and detonated his explosives.
All the dead appeared to be recruits who had boarded an ordinary public service minibus at a bus stop outside the complex, police sources said.
Recruitment centres for the Iraqi army and police, key elements of Washington’s strategy for pulling out its own troops, have been frequent targets for insurgents from the Sunni Arab minority, including al-Qaeda Islamists, who oppose the rise of the Shi’ite Muslim majority in United States-backed elections.
Last week, the US military handed over operational command of the Iraqi army to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a handover Washington said was a significant milestone towards withdrawing 155 000 US-led foreign troops from Iraq.
Maliki postponed his planned first official visit on Monday to fellow Shi’ite Islamist leaders in Iran, an aide said, giving no reason for the delay. No new date had been set, he added.
The two predominantly Shi’ite Muslim countries fought a bloody war in the 1980s when Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, was in power. But relations are warmer since the empowerment of Iraq’s long-oppressed Shi’ites, unsettling once dominant Sunnis.
Washington and other Arab states, dominated by Sunni rulers, are suspicious of non-Arab Iran’s influence in Iraq, where the Islamic Republic has an ”unparalleled ability to affect stability and security across most of the country”, a report by the London-based Chatham House think tank said last month.
Saddam returned to a Baghdad courtroom on Monday to face genocide charges for the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in 1988. The judge turned down defence requests for a delay in proceedings, which could lead to a death sentence.
The resumption of the Anfal case on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States came after a US Senate report last week said there were no links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, despite claims by US President George Bush.
Bush administration officials pointed to supposed links between Saddam and al-Qaeda to help justify their case for war before the March 2003 invasion.
Maliki, struggling to contain sectarian violence that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war, has said he hopes his troops will control most of Iraq by the end of the year.
Under the handover agreement, Iraqi government officials have said, Iraq should have operational command of western Anbar province, a stronghold of Sunni insurgents, by April 1.
But a classified report by a US senior military intelligence officer in Iraq concludes that prospects are dim for securing Anbar, The Washington Post reported on Monday. – Reuters