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Car bombs kill 24 in Iraq, over 100 injured
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-10-05 09:59
Insurgents unleashed a pair of powerful car bombs Monday near the symbol of
US authority in Iraq — the Green Zone, where the US Embassy and key
government offices are located — and hotels occupied by hundreds of foreigners.
Two other explosions brought the day's bombing toll to at least 24 dead and more
than 100 wounded.
Security personnel carry a victim of a bombing
attack in central Baghdad October 4, 2004. Two blasts shook separate areas
of central Baghdad on Monday, with one car bomb blast near the heavily
defended Green Zone killing at least eight people and wounding 30, doctors
and witnesses said. [Reuters] |
More than three dozen car bombings since the beginning of September
illustrate the militants' seeming ability to strike at will despite recent
pledges by the United States and Iraq to intensify the suppression of
insurgents, and the morale-boosting recapture of Samarra over the weekend.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday he does not expect a civil
war to erupt in Iraq, and pointed to the formerly insurgent-held city of Samarra
as an example of success.
"I don't think it's going to happen," Rumsfeld said in New York at the
Council on Foreign Relations, when asked about the threat of civil war. "But
what has to be done in that country is what basically was done in Samarra over
the last 48 hours."
The day's violence also included assassinations of three Iraqis, and U.S.
attacks against targets in insurgent-held Fallujah. In the latest hostage
developments, kidnappers freed two Indonesian women, but a separate militant
group claimed to have killed a Turkish man and a longtime Iraqi resident of
Italy.
An Iraqi man shouts
for help to retrieve victims of a bombing attack from a destroyed vehicle
in central Baghdad October 4, 2004. Two bomb blasts shook separate areas
of central Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 10 people and wounding 70,
while U.S. and Iraqi forces pursued their offensive against rebel
strongholds elsewhere in the country. [Reuters]
Wounded Iraqi men are tended to in Yarmouk
hospital after a bombing attack in central Baghdad October 4, 2004.
[Reuters] |
No coalition forces were wounded in either of Monday's blasts in Baghdad,
said Maj. Phil Smith, a spokesman for the 1st Cavalry Division. But the U.S.
command reported two of its soldiers were killed at a Baghdad traffic checkpoint
Sunday.
In the first car bombing Monday, insurgents detonated a four-wheel drive
vehicle packed with explosives at the western entrance of the heavily fortified
Green Zone about 8:45 a.m., said Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan
Abdul-Rahman.
"I was thrown 10 yards away and hit the wall," said Wissam Mohammed, 30, who
was visiting a nearby recruiting center for Iraqi security forces. His right
hand broken, his head wrapped in bandages and his clothes stained with blood,
Mohammed lay in a bed at Yarmouk Hospital.
The hospital took in 15 bodies and 81 wounded from the explosion, said Sabah
Aboud, the facility's chief registration official.
An hour later, across the Tigris River, a pickup truck packed with dates and
explosives plowed into a three-vehicle convoy as it left a parking lot shared by
several high-rise hotels housing hundreds of foreign contractors and
journalists.
As people rushed to help, gunmen began shooting from the rooftops and police
returned fire, said Tahsin al-Kaabi of the Facility Protection Service, a
U.S.-trained civilian guard force.
At least six people were killed and 15 wounded, said Tahsin al-Freiji,
another guard force member.
One of the four-wheel drive vehicles was destroyed and the pickup truck
carrying the explosives was ripped in half, with one part left dangling from a
shop sign on the opposite side of the street.
At least five other cars were charred, including one of the targeted
vehicles, which had a burned body in the front passenger seat. A head and other
body parts were strewn in the road amid shards of glass.
"I was on my way to work. We heard a big boom and I briefly passed out," said
Razaq Hadi, 36, who was in a minibus that was damaged by the blast. "I saw seven
of the passengers who were seriously wounded being taken out through the broken
windows."
The driver was killed. "I saw his body torn apart," said Hadi, who was
covered in the man's blood.
Both the Green Zone and the area around the hotels have been targets of
previous attacks that have killed dozens of people.
Last month saw at least 39 car bomb attacks in Iraq — the highest number in
any month since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. On Sept. 30, insurgents set
off a series of vehicle explosives that killed at least 35 children and seven
adults at a government ceremony in Baghdad.
Two more car bombs exploded Monday in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.
One of the blasts killed a civilian bystander and two people believed to be
transporting explosives, said Capt. Angela Bowman, a military spokeswoman.
Hospital officials said they treated 11 wounded. The second bomb targeted a U.S.
Army convoy, wounding one American soldier, Bowman said.
In Baqouba, a city 35 miles northeast of the capital, a police commander was
assassinated in a drive-by shooting, police said. Insurgents also fired mortar
rounds at a municipal building, killing one person and wounding seven.
There were also assassinations in Baghdad, where gunmen killed a senior
official of Iraq's Sciences and Technology Ministry and a female employee near
the southeastern Zayona suburb, Abdul-Rahman said.
Monday's violence came despite promises by U.S. and Iraqi officials to crack
down on insurgents ahead of elections slated for January and wrest key parts of
the country from their control.
Late Monday, U.S. warplanes attacked the sprawling Baghdad slum of
Sadr City, and skirmishes were continuing between American troops and rebels in
the area, a spokesman for the insurgents said. The U.S. military had no
information on the reported fighting, but American forces have staged almost
daily attacks there in an effort to root out militiamen loyal to radical Muslim
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
In Fallujah, American warplanes unleashed strikes against suspected terrorist
hideouts and weapons caches early Monday. At least 11 people, including three
women and four children, died in the attacks and 12 others were wounded,
hospital officials said.
The military, which regularly accuses hospitals of inflating casualty
figures, said the strikes targeted followers of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi.
It was the latest in weeks of strikes in the city 40 miles west of Baghdad
aimed at groups with links to terrorists, particularly al-Zarqawi's network.
Followers of the Jordanian militant have claimed responsibility for a string of
deadly bombings, kidnappings and other attacks across the country.
In Samarra, 60 miles northwest of Baghdad, U.S. troops patrolled in tanks,
armored personnel carriers and Humvees as sporadic gunfire broke the relative
calm Monday. U.S. soldiers, accompanied by Iraqi translators carrying lists,
entered houses asking about specific people.
Iraqi National Guard forces have captured 40 foreign fighters, including
Egyptians, Sudanese and a Tunisian, since entering Samarra early Friday, Defense
Minister Hazem Shaalan told Arab TV network Al-Arabiya.
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