Seven children among 24 dead in Iraq
A suicide car bomber drove up to a US vehicle crowded with Iraqi children and detonated his vehicle today, killing one American soldier and at least seven Iraqi children, the US military said.
Iraqi officials put the death toll as high as 24.
Three American soldiers and “multiple Iraqi civilians” were wounded in the late morning blast, said a statement from Task Force Baghdad. The explosion also set a nearby house on fire.
“The Task Force Baghdad unit on the site reported that the vehicle, laden with explosives, drove up to a Humvee before detonating,” the statement said. “Many Iraqi civilians, mostly children, were around the Humvee at the time of the blast.”
Police have reports that 24 were killed and 18 wounded, said police Lt. Mohammed al-Heiali. Another police officer, Lt. Ali Abbas, said that 19 bodies, including children. Were taken to al-Kindi Hospital.
The attack left the east Baghdad neighbourhood stunned. An elderly woman dressed in traditional black beat her chest in front of her house in grief.
Abbas Ali Jassim, who lives in the area, said a US patrol entered the neighbourhood and “children started running behind it when the explosion occurred”.
“They (Americans) were not affected as much as the people. The explosion was mainly on the children,” said Jassim.
Charred remains of an engine block wrapped in barbed wire lay in the street. A child’s bicycle laid crumpled in the street, which was splattered with pools of blood.
Last September, 35 Iraqi children were killed in a string of bombs that exploded as American troops were handing out sweets at a government-sponsored celebration to inaugurate a sewage plant in west Baghdad. It was the largest death toll of children in any insurgent attack since the start of the Iraq conflict.
Many of the families of children killed in the September attack blamed the Americans for the tragedy because their presence attracted insurgents to the ceremony.
In other violence today, gunmen killed an Iraqi soldier while he was driving his car in western Baghdad, police said.
Separately, coalition forces in Baghdad have captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s top lieutenant in Baghdad, Abu Abd al-Aziz, Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday.
Elsewhere, a senior official in Iraq’s Interior Ministry acknowledged today that up to 10 Sunni Arabs suffocated in a police vehicle while in custody and said those responsible will stand trial.
The incident has angered many Iraqis as tension between Sunnis and the Shiite-dominated government is rising. Their deaths are among many complaints of abusive treatment by Iraq’s US-trained security force.
Nine or 10 Sunni men reportedly suffocated after being held for several hours in a vehicle that lacked oxygen following an attack against an Interior Ministry patrol Sunday in west Baghdad.
Temperatures at the time soared to about 45 C (113 F). Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, the head of intelligence department at the Interior Ministry, said the men appear “to have died after the vehicle’s engine was turned off stopping the air conditioning”.
Despite the ongoing violence, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said yesterday that security in many of Iraq’s 18 provinces – notably in the Shiite south and the Kurdish-controlled north – has improved so that Iraqi forces could assume the burden of maintaining order in cities there.
“We can begin with the process of withdrawing multinational forces from these cities to outside the city as a first step that encourages setting a timetable for the withdrawal process,” al-Jaafari said at a news conference with US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick.
Iraqi troops are ready to take control of some cities as a first step toward sending home American and other foreign soldiers, al-Jaafari said. But he rejected any timetable for a pullout “at a time when we are not ready” to confront the insurgents.
He did not specify which cities could be turned over to the Iraqis. The insurgency is focused in Baghdad and the Sunni Arab heartland of central and northern Iraq. Wide areas of the Shiite south and Kurdish north are relatively peaceful.
Zoellick said Washington was committed to supporting the new Iraqi leadership and that US troop strength “will be based on the conditions by which the Iraqi forces are able to meet the effort to deal with the counterinsurgency.”
The Defence Department wants to pull some troops out of Iraq next year, partly because the commitment is stretching the Army and Marine Corps, perilously thin as casualties mount. US commanders believe the presence of a large US force is generating tacit support for anti-American violence.
