Last Throes

[eg420ne]

Attacks in Iraq Kill 100 as Post-Election Violence Escalates
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
and JOHN O'NEIL
BAGHDAD, Jan. 5 - Two new suicide bombings rocked Iraq today, killing at least 100 in attacks at a shrine in the Shiite city of Karbala and a police recruiting station in the Sunni city of Ramadi.

Also today, five American soldiers were killed when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device while operating in the Baghdad region, the American military said.

Preliminary reports from Iraqi police said that 52 people were killed and 64 were wounded in Karbala, south of Baghdad. In Ramadi, 50 people were killed and 60 were wounded, according Dr. Ammar Al-Rawi from Al-Ramadi Hospital.

The killings come on top of attacks that left more than 50 people dead on Wednesday, as violence was escalating again after a lull around the time of last month's parliamentary elections.

Shiites in Karbala reacted angrily to the bombing, the police said, with many shops closing after the attack.

The new wave of violence could complicate the negotiations going on between Shiite, Kurd and Sunni political parties over the formation of a new government. The insurgency is mostly led by Sunnis, the smallest group of the three.

Col. Razzak al-Taee, the chief of police in Karbala said the attack took place about 20 yards outside a shrine that is one of the Shiite region's holiest sites at 10:15 in the morning . in the middle of a large crowd. The area is packed with vendors stalls, he said, and the shrine had a higher number of visitors than usual.

Colonel al-Taee said the bomber had been was wearing an explosive belt under clothing packed with metal balls, and was also carrying hand grenades, one of which failed to detonate.

In Ramadi, the target of the attack was a line of about 1,000 potential recruits waiting to apply for a position in the Iraqi police force, according to a statement released by the American military. The statement gave a lower fatality figure than the doctor at the hospital, reporting 30 deaths.

An official in the Iraqi Interior Ministry said that witnesses reported two separate blasts in Ramadi just before 11 am. A firefighter who took part in the rescue efforts said that he personally helped to load 40 bodies into trucks for removal.

The American military statement said that the applicants were responding to a four-day recruiting drive in Ramadi for a new Iraqi police contingent being created for Anbar province, an area in the western part of the country that has been at the heart of the insurgency. The first three days of the drive produced 600 qualified candidates, the statement said.

Other incidents of violence were reported across Iraq, according to news services. Reuters said that two more American soldiers died, killed by a roadside bomb in Najaf along with two civilians, a report that was not confirmed by the American military.

Reuters also reported that a major gas pipeline near the northern city of Kirkuk was seriously damaged in attacks Wednesday night and this morning; the head of criminal intelligence in Diyala province east of Baghdad was wounded in an ambush; and two people were killed by three car bombs in central Baghdad.

The most lethal attack on Wednesday, hit a frequent target - a funeral packed with Shiite mourners - killing more than 30 people and wounding 36 during a two-stage bombing of a mourning procession in Miqdadiya, 60 miles northeast of the capital.

A spokesman for the Iraqi police in Karbala said that a suicide bomber had been arrested there on Wednesday before he could detonate his device. The arrested man said that four other suicide bombers had entered the city.

In Baghdad, residents awoke on Wednesday to huge traffic jams and roadblocks as Iraqi security forces responded to an attack of a more personal nature: the kidnapping of the sister of Bayan Jabr, the interior minister and one of the most polarizing and, among Sunni Arabs, most hated figures in Iraq. Mr. Jabr, a former Shiite militia leader, has been accused by Sunni Arabs of orchestrating a widespread program of assassinating Sunnis, a charge he denies.

The Arabic satellite network Al Jazeera said it had received a videotape showing Mr. Jabr's sister held captive by an insurgent group that demanded the release of female prisoners held in Interior Ministry jails.

After the kidnapping, Iraqi forces shut down bridges, set up checkpoints, rerouted traffic on Wednesday and conducted wide searches of homes in Sunni-dominated neighborhoods of western Baghdad. An Interior Ministry official confirmed that the operations were in response to the kidnapping, but there was no official public acknowledgment by the ministry. It did not release the kidnapped woman's name.

The attack on the pipeline near Kirkuk was part of what appears to be a concerted effort by insurgents to damage Iraq's fragile fuel infrastructure. On Wednesday, they attacked convoys of gasoline trucks making their way to Baghdad from the large refinery in Baiji, about 150 miles north of capital. One attack destroyed three tankers in a heavily guarded convoy near Taji, north of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. No estimate of the death toll was available.

The capital's fuel supply has been severely strained. Daily gasoline demand has soared by nearly 30 percent, about 500,000 extra gallons, as residents have mobbed gas stations in an effort to fuel electricity generators during a particularly bad period of power shortages, according to the departing oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum. And rumors of a new wave of gas price increases have surfaced, leading to hoarding.

Supplies were drastically cut short late last month after the sabotage of a Baghdad refinery and after the Baiji refinery temporarily shut down when tanker drivers refused to make the drive to the capital because of death threats from insurgents. Convoys from Baiji resumed a few days ago, but while both refineries were down, the capital's gasoline supply dropped by as much as a million gallons a day, Mr. Uloum said.

After news of the funeral blast, Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations urged Iraqis "to refrain from any action which could undermine Iraq's democratic progress." He called the attacks the latest example of an "increasing number of violent incidents" following the vote.

Indeed, despite the tight security throughout Baghdad after the kidnapping of Mr. Jabr's sister, insurgents staged several car bomb attacks, mostly against security forces in Shiite areas.

In Khadhamiya, a large Shiite district, a stationary car bomb ripped through an Iraqi police patrol in the morning, killing 5 and wounding 15, the Interior Ministry said. Later, another car bomb exploded in the dangerous Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad, killing a policeman and 2 civilians and wounding 11.

Gunmen also killed a senior official of the Iraqi Oil Ministry as he drove through the western Baghdad neighborhood of Amariya in the morning, an Interior Ministry official said.

Iraqi officials on Wednesday announced their return to international financial markets with a $2.7 billion bond issue. Under the deal, 650 commercial creditors holding $13.7 billion worth of claims against Iraq agreed to swap those claims for about 20 cents on the dollar's worth of new bonds that have a stronger chance of being repaid. Even though creditors took a huge loss on the face value of the old debts, they all agreed to the exchange, said an American banker who was involved in the deal.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Baghdad for this article, and John O'Neil reported from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/05/international/middleeast/05cnd-iraq.html?pagewanted=print

[eg420ne]

My bad its now 130 dead & 7 dead AMERICAN TROOPS----THANKS GEORGE YOUR THE BEST-------


130 Dead in Series of Attacks in Iraq By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer
20 minutes ago



Suicide bombers targeted Shiite pilgrims in the south and police recruits in central Iraq, and a roadside bomb killed five U.S. soldiers, bringing Thursday's death toll to at least 130 people in a series of attacks as politicians tried to form a coalition government.

The two-day toll from insurgent attacks rose to 183, reflecting a dramatic upsurge in bloodshed following the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections. Some leading Sunni politicians accuse the Shiite-led government of condoning fraud in the voting.

Iraq's prime minister denounced the violence as an attempt to derail the political process at a time when progress was being made toward including the Sunnis in a new, broad-based government and thereby weakening the Sunni-led insurgency.

But Iraq's largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, blamed the violence on Sunni Arab groups that fared poorly in the elections. SCIRI warned that Shiite patience was wearing thin, and it accused the U.S.-led coalition forces of restraining the Iraqi army and its police forces.

Thursday's death toll â?? the largest single-day total since Sept. 29, when 162 died, and one of the bloodiest days in the three-year insurgency â?? included five American soldiers killed by a roadside bomb while patrolling the Baghdad area, the U.S. military said.

Earlier, Iraqi police Capt. Rahim Slaho said the U.S. convoy was heading for the Shiite holy city of Karbala when it was attacked 15 miles south of the city, and five soldiers were killed.

At least 2,188 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began, according to an Associated Press count.

A suicide blast near the Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, killed 63 people and wounded 120, Karbala police spokesman Rahman Meshawi said.

In the attack's aftermath, a woman and an infant girl in a bright red jumpsuit lay in a pool of blood, their faces covered by a sheet. Television images showed men ferrying the wounded in pushcarts.

The bomber appeared to have blown himself up about 30 yards from the shrine in a busy pedestrian area surrounded by shops.

In Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold 70 miles west of Baghdad, a U.S. spokesman said dozens were killed when a suicide bomber attacked a line of about 1,000 police recruits. Marine Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool initially put the death toll at about 30, but Mohammed al-Ani, a doctor at Ramadi General Hospital, later said 56 people were killed and 60 injured.

The attack took place at a police screening center. Pool said recruits later got back in line to continue the screening process.

In other violence Thursday, a suicide car bomb killed three Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Thamir al-Gharawi said, and gunmen killed three people in separate incidents, police said, raising Thursday's death toll to at least 130.

The Karbala bomber detonated a vest stuffed with about 18 pounds of explosives and several hand grenades, al-Taie said. Small steel balls that had been packed into the suicide vest were found at the site, as was one unexploded grenade, he said.

Like many pilgrims, Mohammed Saheb travels to Karbala every Thursday to be at the holy site for Friday prayers.

"I never thought such a crime could happen near this holy site," said Saheb, who had a head injury. "The terrorists spare no place from their ugly deeds. This is a criminal act against faithful pilgrims. The terrorists are targeting the Shiites."

Akram Saleh, a vendor, said he lost consciousness after the explosion.

"I was selling toys near the shrine when I flew into the air because of the explosion," he said from a hospital bed, where he was being treated for burns and bruises.

Karbala's governor, Aqeel al-Khazraji, blamed "takfiris and Saddamists" for the Karbala attack. The takfiri ideology is followed by extremist Sunni Muslims bent on killing anyone they consider an infidel, even fellow Muslims. Al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a takfiri, and his group often has targeted Shiites.

A senior official in the Iraqi Accordance Movement, the main minority Sunni coalition, denounced the violence and called for solidarity among Iraqis to defeat it, but he blamed the government for allowing it to happen.

"This government has not only failed to end violence, but it has become an accomplice in the cycle of violence by adopting sectarian policies and by weakening the state and strengthening militia groups," Izzat al-Shahbandar said.

SCIRI, a partner in the governing Shiite coalition, said the attacks were part of a plot "to eliminate the Shiites in Iraq."

"These crimes took place after statements and threats of a civil war issued by some Iraq political groups," it said. "Such political groups bear the responsibility for every blood drop that was shed."

It said U.S.-led coalition forces were preventing Iraq's army and police from stopping insurgents, an apparent reference to increased American oversight of Shiite-dominated security forces following widespread charges of abuse â?? especially of Sunni Arab detainees.

"The multinational forces, and the political entities that declared their support for terrorism, bear the responsibility for the bloodshed that happened in the recent few days. They should know that the patience of our people will not last for a long time," it said.

Karbala has been relatively free of violence since December 2004, when seven people were killed and 31 wounded in an attack. But the deadliest civilian attack in Iraq since the war began happened on March 2, 2004 in Karbala, when coordinated blasts from suicide bombers, mortars and planted explosives exploded near Muslim shrines, killing at least 181 people.

On Wednesday, a suicide bomber struck a funeral for a Shiite politician's nephew, killing at least 32 mourners, wounding dozens and splattering tombstones with blood. The attack in Muqdadiyah, 60 miles north of Baghdad, bore hallmarks of Islamic extremist groups.

There also were two car bombings in Baghdad and a militant ambush on a convoy of 60 oil tankers heading from Iraq's biggest refinery to the capital.

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U.S. says bomb hit wrong house in Iraq
Strike aimed at insurgents killed 6 family members

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A bomb that killed six civilians Monday near Baiji, Iraq, missed its target by 65 feet (20 meters) and hit the wrong home, military officials said.

The bomb, which was dropped by a U.S. fighter plane, was aimed at a building that three men entered after planting a roadside bomb as an unmanned surveillance plane watched from overhead, the officials said.

A U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat fighter jet strafed the building before the bomb was dropped, according to a U.S. military statement released after the nighttime attack.

The bomb had "successful effects against the insurgents," the statement added.

The strike flattened a family's home, killing six of the family members and wounding three others, said a spokesman for the Salaheddin provincial governor's office. A father and daughter survived with only minor injuries, he said.

The Baiji strike was one of 58 air missions the U.S. military carried out Monday over Iraq.

U.S. military officials said they are investigating why the wrong building was hit.

In a news conference Tuesday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan emphasized the U.S. position that its military "goes out of the way to avoid civilian casualties."

"They target the enemy, they target terrorists and the Saddam loyalists who are seeking to kill innocent civilians and disrupt the transition to democracy," McClellan said.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/01/05/iraq.target/index.html

[Esoteric416]

How long do you think it will be before that father and his daughter are out planting IEDs with the insurgents?
Sometimes the military should just let it go. They saw some guys planting bombs, OK send someone to remove the bombs and see if you can't set up an ambush for the guys if they come back, don't use highly destructive weapons that have a proven(yet acceptable) failure rate in what I'm sure was a densely populated civilian area.

[Esoteric416]

I think that if the violence continues to rise like this then all talk of withdrawing troops will end. Bush will just say, well it looks like we have more work to do. and then he'll send more troops over.