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Flames and smoke rose over Baghdad from a blazing
building after an explosion that was aimed at a
police patrol killed six and wounded seven
passers-by instead.
"We saw a minivan parked outside an electrical goods
store from the morning," said Abu Zahra, who has a
stand selling refreshments, yesterday. "At 10, we
heard the car blow up and it threw me to the ground.
I nearly choked from the smoke. I saw at least five
bodies scattered in the street."
Meanwhile, US and Iraqi army forces sealed off the
northern town of Tal Afar, the scene of heavy
fighting in the past, and imposed a curfew after a
suicide bomb driven into the funeral tent of a
Kurdish official killed 30 people and wounded 50 at
the weekend.
The scale of the continuing violence in Iraq over
the past year was underlined by a US report on the 4
March shooting by American troops of Italian
security agent Nicola Calipari, the rescuer of the
journalist Giuliana Sgrena who had been held
hostage.
It also reveals there were 15,527 attacks on
coalition forces, largely American, from July 2004
to late March 2005. Some 2,404 attacks took place in
Baghdad from 1 November to 12 March.
The report was first issued by the US in a heavily
censored form with sensitive information blocked
out. But an Italian computer specialist discovered
that the censorship was easy to remove.
The picture painted by the uncensored military
report is in sharp contrast to the more optimistic
views given by the Pentagon to the US media.
The bombings in the past week underline that the
insurgents have lost none of their ability to carry
out attacks, almost always without regard for
civilian casualties, all over Iraq. In the three
months since the elections on 30 January there was a
drop in American losses which led to official
optimism that the guerrilla war was on the wane.
There has been an increase in the number of
assassination attempts against Iraqi senior security
officers based on precise intelligence about their
movements. A bomb yesterday slightly wounded
Major-General Fuleih Rasheed, the commander of a
police commando unit linked to the interior
ministry, and two of his men in the Huriya district
of northwest Baghdad. The bomb exploded as Maj-Gen
Rasheed's convoy raced past the point.
A third bomb in Baghdad in the Zayouna district
killed two policemen and wounded 10 people.
It is not clear how far the wave of bombings, some
17 of them in Baghdad, is a response to the
formation of a new government dominated by the Shia
and the Kurds. The Sunni community, the backbone of
the insurgency, received few ministerial positions.
The insurgents are less interested in participation
in the present government than in direct talks with
the US, a timetable for the withdrawal of American
forces and the right to rebuild the Baath party. In
Sunni Arab towns and cities a so-called New Baath
party is beginning to emerge and is said to be very
well organised.
The attack on the Kurdish funeral in Tal Afar, a
Shia Turkoman town west of Mosul, will sharpen
sectarian and ethnic differences in the area. The
bomber blew himself up as Kurds gathered to mourn
Sayed Taleb Sayed Wahab, an official of the
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), who was murdered
three days earlier.
The Kurds see Tal Afar as being a stronghold of the
resistance. "There are more than 250 dangerous
terrorists there," Khasro Goran, the KDP leader and
deputy governor in Mosul, said before the attack on
the funeral. He was trying to get US support for an
Iraqi army assault on the town.
Mr Goran said he had received a sympathetic hearing
from the American military when he proposed a joint
assault. There are two Iraqi National Guard
battalions, whose men are all Kurds, in the region,
supported by a police commando force "Wolf", which
is mostly Shia.
A problem for the US is that political differences
in northern Iraq are based on ethnic differences
between Kurds, Turkoman and Sunni Arab. The Kurds
are moving back into lands west of Mosul known as
Sinjar from which they were evicted by Saddam
Hussein.
www.independent.co.uk
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