More Iraqi police killed
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Insurgents continued targeting Iraqi security forces Thursday, killing five policemen and wounding at least six others in three separate attacks in Baghdad and Baqouba, Iraqi security officials said. At least one bystander and four insurgents were also killed in the attacks, they said.
The killings followed two bombings in Baghdad on Wednesday in which 12 Iraqi soldiers were killed, and a massive car bombing Monday in the central city of Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, that killed at least 125 people. Although that blast purportedly targeted Iraqi military recruits, many of the dead included shoppers at a local market.
The attacks are part of a campaign by insurgents against Iraqi security forces that has escalated since the Jan. 30 elections, from which a coalition of predominantly Shiite Muslim parties – the United Iraqi Alliance – emerged with a slim majority in Iraq’s 275-member parliament. The coalition is negotiating with other parties to forge a broad-based government that could include ethnic Kurds, secular Shiites and possibly Sunni Muslims, but competing political demands and spiraling violence are complicating the effort.
“These acts just continue to hold Iraqi communities hostage to terrorist elements in the hope to divide communities,” the interim national security adviser, Mowaffak Rubaie, said in a statement. “The Iraqi government will go after and hunt down each and every one of these terrorists, whether in Iraq or elsewhere.”
The U.S. military on Thursday announced the deaths of three soldiers the day before. One soldier assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in Babil province, south of Baghdad, and two soldiers were killed after their vehicle was hit by a bomb while on nighttime patrol in central Baghdad, according to a military statement. It did not provide details.
Those casualties pushed the number of U.S. military deaths since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to 1,502, according to the Associated Press.
Because of the continuing violence, the government announced Thursday that interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi had extended a state of emergency until March 31 in all parts of the country except the Kurdish north, where the situation is calmer. The state of emergency effectively imposes martial law and gives the government wide powers to impose curfews, restrict movement and suspend liberties.
Thursday’s violence began in Baghdad at 7:45 a.m., when a car approaching the entrance to Iraq’s Interior Ministry did not slow down, and suspicious guards opened fire on it, killing the driver and causing an explosion, according to Col. Adnan Abdul Rahman, a ministry spokesman.
About 30 seconds later, a Jeep with three men inside refused orders to stop as it approached the same checkpoint, and soldiers again opened fire, killing the three occupants and causing the vehicle to explode, he said.
In all, five policemen and four insurgents were killed in the incidents, Abdul Rahman said.
In Baqouba, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, a car bomb detonated just as a convoy carrying the city’s police chief was pulling out of police headquarters, according to Lt. Col. Mudhafar Jubouri of the Baqouba police. One bystander was killed and five police officers were wounded.
“All Iraqis have become targets now, particularly people who work with Americans, Iraqi police or the ING (Iraqi National Guard),” said Samih Salim, 26, who works as a handyman and porter in a supermarket near the site of Thursday’s blasts in Baghdad.