A rchive Date
[ 27-10-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2003/09/11/238648-ap.html
Iraq bombings leave dozens dead
By CHARLES HANLEY
Mon, October 27, 2003
BAGHDAD (CP) - In a shocking day of bloodshed across Baghdad, a team of suicide car bombers bent on death for "collaborators" devastated the Red Cross headquarters and three police stations Monday, killing three dozen people and wounding more than 200.
From north to south in this city of five million, the string of bombings left streetscapes of bloody, broken bodies, twisted wreckage and Iraqis unnerved by an apparently escalating underground war against the U.S. occupation. A Canadian aid worker in Baghdad says people were at a loss to explain why anyone would want to attack the Red Cross.
"Very clearly the Iraqi people don't understand why some people are doing this," said David Milne, a retired social worker from Belleville, Ont., who is in Baghdad with the Christian Peacemaker Teams. The dead included a U.S. soldier, eight Iraqi policemen and at least 26 Iraqi civilians.
No Canadians were known to have been among the casualties, Reynald Doiron, a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, said Monday.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said they believed loyalists of Iraq's ousted president Saddam Hussein were responsible for the bombings. U.S. President George W. Bush said insurgents had become more "desperate" because of what he said was progress in Iraq. But here in Baghdad, top Iraqi and U.S. officers blamed "foreign fighters," not Saddam diehards, for the day's mayhem. "That's a reasonable supposition," said a U.S. general responsible for the Iraqi capital.
It underscored the confusion and tension generated by two days of bold, stunning attacks, beginning with a rocket barrage that pounded a U.S. headquarters hotel on Sunday morning, killing a U.S. colonel, wounding 15 other people and sending American officials scurrying to safety, including the visiting deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.
Later Sunday, three U.S. soldiers were killed in two attacks in the Baghdad area. Then at 8:30 a.m. Monday, on a warm, clear morning beginning the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, the first of four thunderous explosions rocked the city.
A police car, somehow commandeered for a suicide mission and driven by a man in police uniform, blew up after entering the courtyard of the al-Baya'a police station in the southern district of ad-Doura, said police Brig.-Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, the deputy interior minister.
Officers at the scene said the blast killed 15 Iraqis and one U.S. soldier, and the U.S. military said six other Americans were wounded. American troops, including military police, have been guarding or working with local police stations.
Just five minutes later, the second blast struck the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, a small, three-storey building on a quiet street in the central city. This bomber, too, used a subterfuge - a standard Iraqi ambulance that apparently was able to approach the ICRC offices without suspicion.
"I saw this ambulance driving up toward the Red Cross, and then suddenly it blew up," said cigarette vendor Ghani Khadim, 50. The vehicle had stopped some 20 metres from the front of the Red Cross building, at a protective line of earth-filled barrels, and disintegrated as it blew a five-metre-wide crater in the road.
The blast knocked down a 12-metre section of the ICRC's sandbag-backed front wall, demolished a dozen nearby cars and apparently broke a water main, flooding the streets. The building's interior was wrecked - a scene of shattered glass, doors blown off their hinges, toppled bookcases and collapsed ceilings.
More than 100 staff members normally would have been inside, but starting time had been pushed back to 9 a.m. because of Ramadan, and probably only one-quarter of the normal staff was present. Red Cross headquarters in Geneva said 12 people were killed, only two of them employees, believed to be security guards, and the rest apparently passersby.
Milne, whose residence is about two kilometres from the Red Cross, rushed to the scene after hearing the blast and seeing a large black plume of smoke drifting across the sky. He described students and teachers from the many schools in the area appearing to be in mild shock.
"Glass had blown out of their buildings. Blackboards had fallen down," he said. There was a lot of shooting right afterward by Iraqi police "that terrified the children."
The Red Cross and other aid organizations had reduced their Baghdad staffs after the car bombing of UN headquarters here Aug. 19, an attack apparently aimed at discouraging international organizations from assisting, even indirectly, the U.S.-led occupation. Twenty-three people, including two Canadians, were killed in the UN bombing.
Twenty minutes after the attack on the ICRC, an organization that has long strived for political neutrality, another car bomber detonated his explosives-packed vehicle at a police station near a marketplace in the al-Shaab district of north Baghdad. Gen. Ibrahim said the greatest number of casualties occurred there.
After another 20 minutes, the fourth suicide bomber struck in southwest Baghdad, at the al-Khudra police station, destroying the front of that building.
Besides the dead, at least 224 people were reported wounded in the four attacks, including 65 policemen, Ibrahim said. The 34 dead he reported apparently did not include the American soldier the U.S. command said was killed at al-Baya'a, nor was it clear whether he was counting the four suicide drivers.
At 10:15 a.m., another bombing was attempted, at a police station in the eastern district of New Baghdad, where officers managed to spot and stop a Land Cruiser driver from detonating his load of explosives. The man set off a grenade that wounded an officer and himself, and when he was seized, "he was shouting, 'Death to the Iraqi police! You're collaborators!' " said police Sgt. Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
Ibrahim said the man was carrying a Syrian passport and told officers he was Syrian.
Monday's escalation in tactics - the string of bombings brought the bloodiest day to Baghdad since the end of the U.S.-Iraq war last April - suggested a level of organization that U.S. officials had doubted the resistance possessed. But it also pointed out the disparate nature of the enemies the Americans are fighting - from hit-run guerrillas, perhaps Saddam loyalists, who are staging an average of 26 low-profile attacks on U.S. forces daily, to bombers, perhaps Islamic fanatics, staging suicide terror strikes.
The resistance is believed also to include other Iraqis who simply resent the U.S. military occupation of their country or who have personal grievances against what they see as U.S. brutality against friends and neighbours.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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