Suicide bomber kills 12
A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb north of Baghdad today, killing 12 Iraqis – all but one of them National Guards – in another strike against those co-operating with American forces, the US military said.
Eleven other guardsmen were wounded in the blast near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad in the so-called Sunni Triangle, the scene of frequent assaults on US and Iraqi security forces.
US military spokesman Maj. Neal E. O’Brien said a civilian was among the 12 killed while the other casualties were members of Iraq’s 203rd National Guard Battalion. The driver of the vehicle also died.
“Those responsible for suicide attacks are seeking to halt Iraq’s progress on the path to democracy,” O’Brien said.
In other violence, assailants killed a police officer in a drive-by shooting in southern Baghdad late yesterday, police commissioner Najm Eid said. He said a Shiite cleric was also killed in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Amil.
Gunmen shot dead a deputy governor of the eastern Diyala province, Ali Haddawi, in his car, doctor Ahmed Fouad at the Baqoubah General Hospital said today.
The attacks came a day after Al-Qaida’s arm in Iraq issued a video showing militants executing five Iraqi security officers in the street, the latest move in their campaign to intimidate Iraqis ahead of the national elections scheduled for January 30.
A statement posted yesterday on an Islamist Web site along with the video denounced the officers as “American dogs” and threatened other Iraqis with the same fate if they join security forces.
Insurgents have carried out numerous attacks on Iraqi forces in recent weeks, aiming to discredit elections.
The US military and the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi want the Iraqi police and National Guard to provide security for the vote, and mass desertions from those forces could scuttle such plans.
Additional US troops had to be deployed in the volatile northern city of Mosul to boost security there ahead of the vote, the military said in a statement Sunday. It did not provide the size of the additional force in the town considered a hotbed of militant activity.
The insurgents’ video and the statement were issued by al-Qaida in Iraq, the group led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Separate photos of the executions indicated they occurred in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, on December 26.
One of five masked gunmen behind the doomed men reads a statement describing them as a “bunch of apostates” who came to Ramadi to support “the apostate Allawi government and help the unjust American enemy.”
“As usual, jihadists have no mercy when it comes to such infidel souls,” he says.
The video then shows the men being shot in the back. After they fall to the ground, the gunmen kick them, apparently to see if any survived, then pump more bullets into them.
In a separate statement posted on the internet yesterday, al-Zarqawi’s group also claims responsibility for a number of attacks targeting security forces around Iraq earlier in the week.
In other developments, the US military said that Iraqi security forces “decisively defeated” another attack by the insurgents as they attempted to seize a police station in south-east Mosul yesterday – the fifth such attack in a week.
US-led forces from 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division detained 14 people “for anti-Iraqi activities” during operations yesterday in northern Iraq, a statement said.
