A suicide car bomber killed up to 12 Iraqis near a US-Iraqi base in Baghdad on Sunday and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor in a new spate of assassinations.
The US-led administration has said insurgents may step up attacks before and after the occupation formally ends on June 30, to disrupt the handover and discredit Iraq's new government.
While the new bloodshed seemed to bear out that view, two foreign hostages, a Turk and an Egyptian, were freed after what a mediator called talks with men close to their captors.
Police at the scene of the car bombing said their colleagues had tried to stop a vehicle racing on the wrong side of the road towards an Iraqi military college in south-east Baghdad, where many US soldiers are also based.
Abdul Razzak Kadhem, a senior police officer, said two police cars had intercepted the vehicle, which then exploded.
The US military said the blast had killed eight Iraqi civilians and four policemen, and wounded 13 people.
Two charred bodies could be seen in the burnt wreckage of one police car. All that remained of the bomber's car was a blackened engine in the road. Several civilian vehicles were damaged. Blood stained the driver's seat of a white pick-up.
Another car bomb detonated outside Taji, north of Baghdad, during an attack on US troops, killing one American soldier and wounding two others. One attacker was killed when troops returned fire, an army spokeswoman said.
The Iraqi civil servant, Kamal al-Jarrah, 63, who headed the education ministry's cultural relations department, was shot in his garden in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital.
He died in hospital, an education ministry official said. Jarrah's wife, who was with him in the garden, was unhurt.
Assassins also struck at Baghdad University, where they shot dead geography professor Sabri al-Bayati as he walked on a road just outside the campus on Sunday, university guards said.
Two Iraqis working for US-funded Iraqi television network Al-Iraqiya were found dead near the Syrian border after they were killed on Saturday, colleagues said, adding that the motive for the attack was unclear.
Moqtada al-Sadr, who agreed a truce with US forces and Iraqi authorities this month, now plans to create a political party that could contest elections due to be held by January under a UN-approved plan for Iraq's post-war political transition.
US officials want Sadr excluded from politics, saying he should face Iraqi murder charges. Sadr says he is innocent.
While the truce has calmed violence in the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, US forces are still clashing with Sadr's fighters in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.
Five Iraqis were killed during clashes with US forces in Sadr city overnight, officials of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's group said on Sunday.
"Three of the dead were civilians, two were members of the Mehdi Army," one official said, referring to Sadr's militia, which is thought to number several thousand men.
One of the dead was Karim Daraan, a Mehdi Army field commander in the sprawling Sadr City slum, which is home to over one million Shias.
Hundreds of Iraqis waved assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers in the air during Daraan's funeral on Sunday, vowing loyalty to Sadr.
"Moqtada, Moqtada," the mourners chanted as Daraan's coffin, draped in the old Iraqi flag, wound its way through the streets atop a van.
Three civilians and two militiamen were killed there in overnight gun battles, a spokesman for Sadr said.
In northern Iraq, gunmen killed Iyad Khorshid, a Kurdish religious leader, overnight in the latest of a series of murders in the ethnically divided city of Kirkuk, police said.
A former local official was also shot dead in his home and attackers wounded six policemen on night patrol in Kirkuk.
Comments
Comments are closed.