Bomb explodes near hospital, killing 17 in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq – A car bomb killed 17 people Saturday and injured 21 others in a mostly Shiite Muslim town south of Baghdad, and U.S. troops backed by tanks battled rebels in the country’s third-largest city as the insurgency showed no sign of abating after national elections.
Officials plan to announce the final results of the Jan. 30 vote today, election commission spokesman Farid Ayar said.
Another car bomb exploded in an eastern Baghdad neighborhood as a U.S. military convoy passed, killing an Iraqi woman and wounding three others but causing no American casualties, Iraqi police said. The bomb exploded about half a mile from a U.S. Army base.
The car bomb south of Baghdad exploded near the main hospital in Musayyib, a mostly Shiite town 35 miles south of Baghdad along the Euphrates River. The town is in a religiously mixed area that has been the scene of frequent attacks by Sunni Muslim insurgents.
It appeared the attack was part of a campaign by Sunni Arab extremists against the country’s Shiites – an estimated 60 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people – who stand on the verge of a major election victory as officials finish the final vote tallies.
More than 100 people were killed in the past week in sectarian and insurgency-related violence, much of it targeting Shiite Muslims.
Ayar said on Al-Arabiya television the election commission would meet this morning to finalize some unspecified issues and then announce the final figures in the afternoon. The results will be considered official after a three-day period.
“We will give three days to verify the results, hear any disputes, and then they will be officially declared final,” Ayar said. “All the numbers will be announced tomorrow.”
Partial returns show a Shiite-dominated ticket endorsed by the Shiite clergy leading in the race for the 275 seats in the National Assembly. Shiite religious groups appear to have won control of provincial councils in wide areas of the country, including the two biggest cities, Baghdad and Basra.
Sunni Arab extremists, fearing a loss of their privileged position, have accused the Americans of manipulating the election to install Shiites and Kurds in power. Sunni Arabs, an estimated 20 percent of the population, form the heart of the insurgency, and many of them boycotted the election.
Fears of sectarian violence prompted the Iraqi government to announce a five-day closing of the nation’s borders starting Thursday to protect worshippers during a major Shiite religious holiday, the Feast of Ashoura, that peaks next weekend.
U.S. and Iraqi officials hoped the election eventually would produce a stable government with the resources and public support to crush the insurgency. In the short run, however, U.S. military officials have warned that the war with the Sunni insurgents was far from over.
Meanwhile, fierce clashes broke out Saturday in the northern city of Mosul after American troops, responding to a mortar attack on one of their bases, were attacked with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades by insurgents inside a mosque, U.S. officials said.
The insurgents disabled a U.S. Army tank and a Stryker armored vehicle during the battle, which raged for hours around the mosque, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla said. U.S. troops killed nine insurgents but suffered no fatalities, Kurilla said.
A woman died when a mortar round hit her house during the fighting, and another person was killed when a bomb exploded in another part of Mosul, hospital officials said.
Earlier Saturday, Mosul police discovered the bodies of 12 men – six dressed in Iraqi National Guard uniforms and six Kurdish security guards – dumped in two areas of the city.
Notes left near the bodies of the Iraqi guardsmen said, “This is the destiny for those who participated in besieging Fallujah,” referring to November’s U.S.-led assault on the insurgent bastion 40 miles west of Baghdad.