Six car bombs killed at least 19 people across Baghdad on Thursday as Iraq’s prime minister urged the United States to give Iraqi forces more weapons and said he could bring security in three to six months if they did.
Three bombs in quick succession killed at least 10 people and wounded 30 in a wholesale vegetable market in the violent southern district of Dora, police said.
”There is no mercy any more, the people here just want to work,” vegetable seller Mohammed Ali Kazim shouted angrily. ”They have followed us to this poor place. People here are Sunnis, Shi’ites and Christians and they just want to live.”
Earlier, a car bomb in Saadoun Street, a main commercial thoroughfare, killed four people and wounded 10. Two others killed two and three people respectively in the mainly Shi’ite east of the city. One went off near a police station.
There has been a surge of violence this week as the Iraqi government prepares to launch a US-backed security crackdown in Baghdad, widely seen as a last chance to save Iraq from an all-out sectarian civil war.
The difficulty in ending the violence has prompted plans by US President George Bush to send 21 500 additional troops to Iraq to stabilise Baghdad and mainly Sunni Anbar province.
But Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told foreign newspapers in comments published on Thursday that Iraq’s need for US troops could diminish within months if the United States gave Iraqi security forces sufficient arms and other supplies.
”If we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces, I think that within three to six months our need for American troops will dramatically go down,” Britain’s Times quoted him as saying.
At the White House, Bush tried to avoid a public clash with Maliki.
”My new strategy is aimed at helping the Iraqi government do exactly what the prime minister said what he wants to do,” he told Sinclair Broadcasting. ”Now it’s up to him.”
”I believe it will work,” Bush told Belo television, a US group of local stations.
Maliki has blamed the most recent surge in bloodshed on Sunni Arab followers of Saddam Hussein angered by his December 30 execution.
$8,4-billion a month
As the war in Iraq becomes increasingly unpopular in the United States, Democrats, who took control of Congress from Republicans this month, have promised tougher oversight of defense spending, while challenging Bush’s plans to broaden the US war effort in Iraq.
But while Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the US House of Representatives, said Congress would vote to oppose Bush’s new Iraq war strategy, she added she would not move to block funding for a troop increase.
”Democrats will never cut off funding for our troops when they are in harm’s way.” Pelosi said in a taped interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, airing on Friday. ”The president knows that because the troops are in harm’s way, that we won’t cut off the resources. That’s why he’s moving so quickly to put them in harm’s way.”
The Pentagon previously estimated last year’s costs for the war at about $8-billion a month but the price tag will hit $8,4-billion per month this year, Deputy Defence Secretary Gordon England told the US House of Representatives Budget Committee on Thursday.
The war cost around $4,4-billion per month during the first year of fighting in fiscal 2003 but costs were rising because the US military was having to replace big-ticket items such as helicopters, airplanes and armoured vehicles that were wearing out or lost in combat.
The plan to send 21 500 additional US troops to Iraq would cost about $5.6 billion.
Bloody days
The United Nations said this week that more than 34 000 Iraqi civilians were killed in violence last year.
The Iraqi government on Thursday rejected the report as superficial and unprofessional. It did not directly reject the figure itself but said it was compiling its own statistics.
At least 15 people were killed on Wednesday when a bomb ripped through a crowded market in Sadr City, a poor Shi’ite district in eastern Baghdad. On Tuesday, at least 105 people were killed in bombings and a mass shooting in the capital, including 70 at a Baghdad university not far from Sadr City.
The area is a stronghold of the Mehdi Army, loyal to radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and blamed for most sectarian killing in Baghdad. Iraqi officials say the Baghdad security plan is aimed at crushing the Mehdi Army and other militias.
Maliki, who owes his position partly to support from Sadr, insisted he would strike armed groups whatever their religion or politics — a key demand of Washington. – Reuters