Baghdad bombings kill 60 in first blow to security plan

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Baghdad bombings kill 60 in first blow to security plan

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

AFP - Feb 18, 2007
http://www.afp.com/english/news/stories/070218163949.6o0ecbqr.html

Baghdad bombings kill 60 in first blow to security plan

BAGHDAD (AFP) - A double car bombing has ripped through a crowded
Baghdad market, killing at least 60 people and wounding more than 130
in a first vicious blow to the city's new US-led security operation.

"Where is the security plan?" wailed distraught relatives crowded
outside the Iraqi capital's Kindi Hospital on Sunday, as fleets of
ambulances and civilian trucks ferried the dead and dying into an
overworked emergency room.

Kindi received 42 corpses -- including 10 children aged between five
and 10 -- and was treating 83 seriously wounded patients, medics said.

Ibn Nafees Hospital saw 14 dead and 20 critically injured men, women
and children, a medic there said. The doctors warned that these figures
would rise and a security official put the latest toll at 60 dead.

A first explosion ripped through a crowded vegetable market in Baghdad
Jadida, a mixed but mainly Shiite district of east Baghdad.

At almost the same moment, another booby-trapped car detonated a few
hundred metres (yards) away near a row of electrical goods shops.

Desperate bystanders scoured the blackened debris for wounded loved
ones, while shell-shocked bystanders loaded the injured into civilian
vehicles.

In a separate attack in nearby Sadr City, a suicide car bomber attacked
a checkpoint manned by Iraqi police commandos, killed one policeman and
one civilian bystander and wounded 11 more, a security official said.

Earlier, an unidentified sniper shot dead three civilians shopping in
the Fadhel district of the city, according to a defence official.

Separately, the US military announced its first casualties since the
launch of the plan -- two soldiers killed in north Baghdad on Saturday,
one by an insurgent's grenade, the other by small arms fire.

Car bomb attacks in east Baghdad are the hallmark of Sunni extremists
targeting Shiite civilians in the Iraqi capital's vicious sectarian war.

Last Monday, at least 79 people were killed in similar attacks on
Shiite markets, but the violence had tailed off since the launch of a
large-scale security operation by US and Iraqi forces on Wednesday.

Shortly before the blasts, the commander of Iraqi forces involved in
the operation, General Abboud Gambar, had toured parts of Baghdad
Jadida with reporters to demonstrate the progress made by his forces.

"I want to tell the people, from this place, that security is coming to
Baghdad," Gambar told reporters. "We will chase the terrorists out of
Baghdad."

Nevertheless, junior security minister Shirwan al-Waili, who
accompanied him on the trip, warned: "The security plan will take a
long time, because the terrorists are an enemy with a long-term
strategy."

As their heavily armed 20-vehicle convoy left the area, smoke could
already be seen rising over the market.

Meanwhile, Iraq started to reopen its borders with Iran and Syria,
which had been closed temporarily three day earlier to allow security
equipment and procedures to be updated as part of the security plan.

"We received orders today from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to open
the border posts from 6:00 am (0300 GMT) this morning," General Rahdi
Mohassen of the Iraqi border force told reporters at the Shalamchen
border post.

A senior security official in Baghdad confirmed that two main routes
into Syria and four into Iran had reopened. Other routes will remain
closed for the time being, with more opening in the coming days,
officials said.

The United States, which has 140,000 troops in Iraq, accuses Iran and
Syria of allowing militants and weapons to be smuggled into their
neighbour to carry out attacks on US and government forces and Iraqi
civilians.

Iran and Syria deny the charge.

The closure was part of a broader operation in which thousands of extra
US and Iraqi troops have been sent into Baghdad, the epicentre of a
vicious civil war between rival Sunni and Shiite factions.

"Nearly 20,000 security patrols were conducted this week," said US
spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl. "Since the operation
started, there has been a reduction in the number of attacks across the
Iraqi capital."

US officials did not offer any figures for the number of attacks
recorded, and have been careful not to raise hopes of a rapid victory,
but an Iraqi military spokesman said Saturday that violence was down 80
percent.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), released a study
revealing that one third of Iraq's population of 27 million live in
poverty, and five percent in extreme poverty after almost three decades
of war and sanctions.


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