Syrian minister begins landmark Iraq trip
Syria’s foreign minister arrived in Baghdad today, becoming the highest ranking official from his country to visit since the war began in 2003.
Syria is increasingly seen as key to helping stem the insurgency.
The sectarian violence continued today, with the deadliest attack in the southern Shiite city of Hillah, where a suicide bomber in a minibus lured labourers to his vehicle with promises of a job then blew it up, killing 22 people, police said.
Attacks by suspected insurgents in other areas of Iraq killed more than 30 people and wounded at least 75. Gunmen also kidnapped one of Iraq’s deputy health ministers from his home in northern Baghdad, officials said.
Both the Iraqi government and its US sponsors have repeatedly accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to cross into Iraq. Syria denies the charge, saying it is impossible to control the long desert border.
Syrian foreign minister Walid Moallem’s visit, his first since Saddam Hussein was ousted, is a major step toward restoring diplomatic relations severed more than 25 years ago. He was to meet with the Iraqi leadership, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The Bush administration is under growing pressure to ask adversaries such as Iran and Syria for help in trying to avoid the collapse of an increasingly violent Iraq.
Negotiating with the two countries would entail a major policy shift for US President George Bush, whose reluctance to talk to them – and US adversaries in general – has come under increasing criticism.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who advised Bush on the Iraq war, said military victory is no longer possible and joined calls for the US government to seek help from Iraq’s regional neighbours, including Iran.
“If you mean, by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he said on the BBC TV.
Following the Hillah bombing, crying and screaming Shiite women searched the scene for their sons. Some blamed Sunni Arab insurgents for the attack. Others said Hillah’s police do not provide poor people such as labourers with adequate security.
“The ground was covered with the remains of people and blood, and survivors ran in all directions,” said Muhsin Hadi Alwan, 33, one of the wounded workers. “How will I feed the six members of my family when I return home without work and without money?”
Mohammed Abbas Kadhim, 30, said he was thrown several yards by the explosion.
“I couldn’t see or hear for a few minutes as I was lying on the ground. People were racing everywhere looking for their missing sons, brothers, friends - all of them shouting ‘God is great’.”
The blast shattered windows and ripped holes in concrete stalls and storefronts nearby. Some business owners were using brooms to sweep away debris from the blast. Others stood nearby, surveying the damage as if in a daze.
Soldiers also gathered at the site, in part to guard the heavily damaged shops and stalls from scavengers. Some of the stalls were serving traditional breakfasts of boiled eggs and tea to the labourers when the explosion occurred.
As medics carried stretchers into the nearby hospital, residents lined up outside offering to donate blood. Dr Mohammed Dhiya, the hospital’s manager, said all the city’s doctors were called to work.
Hillah has been the site of many deadly bomb attacks.
In August, an explosives-rigged bicycle blew up near an army recruiting centre in the city, killing at least 12 people. In May, a car packed with explosives blew up at a dealership in Hillah, killing 12 people and wounding 32.
One of the worst bomb attacks in Iraq during the war also occurred in Hillah, when a suicide car bomber killed 125 national guard and police recruits in February 2005.
Elsewhere in Iraq, 24 civilians, five policemen and a soldier were killed and 58 Iraqis were wounded in a series of attacks by suspected insurgents in the cities of Baghdad, Mosul and Baqouba, police said.
US and Iraqi forces also killed 12 insurgents, detained 11, and freed eight Iraqi hostages while conducting raids in Baqouba and two villages near Kirkuk, police said. A local al Qaida in Iraq leader and his son were killed by Iraqi forces in a village 60 miles north of Baghdad.
Near the southern city of Basra, Iraqi forces searching for four American security contractors and an Austrian kidnapped in the area detained about 200 suspected insurgents in raids Saturday night, police said. None of the hostages was found.
The deputy health minister, Ammar al-Saffar, a Shiite, was snatched from his home near the Sunni neighbourhood of Azamiyah, said Hakem al-Zamily a fellow deputy health minister. The kidnapping came nearly a week after dozens of suspected Shiite militia gunmen kidnapped scores of people from a Ministry of Higher Education office in central Baghdad.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, a suicide attacker detonated his explosives belt at a funeral for a Kurdish man shot dead the night before. At least three people were killed and 17 wounded, police said.
In today’s worst attack by suspected insurgents outside Hillah, a roadside bomb and two car bombs exploded one after another near a bus station in Mashtal, a mostly Shiite area of south-eastern Baghdad, killing 11 civilians and wounding 51, police said.
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