Four bombs kill 31 in Baghdad

Three civilians were killed when a roadside bomb struck a Ministry of Industry bus in eastern Baghdad. Thirteen were injured in the attack, said police Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Abbod.

Al-Qaida in Iraq said it launched yesterday’s attacks. There was no immediate claim for today’s bombings.

Al-Qaida’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, purportedly declared “all-out war” on Shiites, Iraqi troops and the government in an audiotape posted Wednesday on a website known for carrying extremist Islamic content.

US forces and insurgents, meanwhile, reportedly clashed in the troubled western town of Ramadi, a militant stronghold on the main road to neighbouring Jordan.

A website posting purportedly from al-Qaida in Iraq said its forces had engaged the American military in the predominantly Sunni city of about 800,000.

Yesterday, more than a dozen co-ordinated bombings ripped through Baghdad, killing 160 people and wounding 570. Many of the victims were day labourers lured by a suicide attacker posing as an employer.

In claiming it carried out yesterday’s attacks, al Qaida said it was taking retaliation for the rout of militants from their base in Tal Afar, the northern city near the Syrian border.

“The was just one minute and one kilometre between the two car bombs,” said police Captain Firas Gaiti. He said at least seven policemen died and 10 were wounded.

In the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, insurgents detonated a roadside bomb next to a passing patrol, killing two police officers and wounding four, said Colonel Anwar Hassan, head of the local security unit.

US and Iraqi troops in Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold 70 miles west of Baghdad, came under mortar attack this morning as armed militants roamed the streets, police Capt. Nasir Alusi said.

All shops in the town – a major insurgent stronghold – were closed and the streets were empty as automatic gunfire echoed through the town’s industrial zone, Alusi said.

Yesterday’s spasm of violence terrorised the capital for more than nine hours. The first attack, at 6.30am, was the deadliest: a suicide car blast which tore through the predominantly Shiite Muslim neighbourhood of Kazimiyah.

In what was believed to be a new tactic, the bomber set off the explosive after calling the construction and other workers to his small van and enticing them with promises of employment, a witness said.

At least 112 people were killed and more than 200 were wounded, according to Health Ministry officials. Twisted hulks of vehicles blocked the blood0=-stained main street in Kazimiyah’s Oruba Square.

The al-Zarqawi tape yesterday was a clear attempt, coming on the heels of the attacks, to create a climate of fear, sow deeper sectarian discord and scare Iraqis away from the October 15 referendum on a new constitution.

Iraqi forces arrested two insurgents in connection with the Kazimiyah bombing, one of them a Palestinian and the other a Libyan, Iraqi television quoted Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari as saying.

Al-Jaafari also said the suicide bomber was a Syrian, without offering any details how the identification was made so quickly.

The bloodshed came as US and Iraqi forces pressed their offensive against insurgents in the northern city of Tal Afar and along the Euphrates River valley, striking hard at what officials have said were militants sneaking across the border from Syria.

Al-Qaida in Iraq said in a website posting that it launched the attacks, some less than 10 minutes apart, in response to the Tal Afar offensive, which began on Saturday.

“To the nation of Islam, we give you the good news that the battles of revenge for the Sunni people of Tal Afar began yesterday,” said the al-Qaida statement posted on a militant website. Its authenticity could not be confirmed.

The audiotape was posted later yesterday. The speaker, introduced as al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, said his militant forces would attack any Iraqi they believe has co-operated with the Tal Afar offensive.

“If proven that any of Iraq’s national guards, police or army are agents of the Crusaders, they will be killed and his house will demolished or burned - after evacuating all women and children – as a punishment,” the speaker said.

A spokesman for the influential Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars condemned Zarqawi’s threats, and said he was trying to foment civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.

“Zarqawi speaks from the position of revenge,” Muhammed Bashar Faidi, a spokesman for the group, said on Al-Arabiya television today. “This position by Zarqawi is aimed at provoking sectarian war, but if he wants a war he should fight the occupation forces and not innocents.”

In addition yesterday, attackers killed 17 men – including Iraqi drivers and construction workers for the US military – in a Sunni village north of Baghdad before dawn.

That raised the death toll in and around the capital Wednesday to 177. A senior Health Ministry official said 570 people were wounded in all.

At least six attacks targeted US forces, Iraqi authorities said. The US military said there were four direct attacks on Americans, with 10 soldiers wounded. No US deaths were reported.

A gun fight between insurgents and paramilitary police broke out in the capital’s southern neighbourhood of Saydiya. One policeman was killed and another wounded, a spokesman said.

Police found the bodies of seven unidentified men in various parts of the capital. All had their hands tied and were blindfolded.

In northern Baghdad, police said they found the body of a policeman who had been handcuffed and shot in the head.

In Baqouba, one policeman was killed and three injured in separate attacks by insurgents using mortars and small-arms fire.