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| Iraq-Jordan |
| 20 killed in suicide bombing at Baghdad recruiting center |
| 2005-07-02 |
| WaPo - reprinted in SF Chron A suicide bomber killed 20 people waiting outside a police recruiting center in Iraq's capital today, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. The attacker wore an explosives-laden belt and blew himself up outside the recruiting center in west Baghdad's Yarmouk neighborhood, said police Col. Adnan Abdul Rahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman. Most of those killed were recruits, he said. On Friday, gunmen assassinated an aide to Iraq's most prominent Shiite Muslim cleric on a street in central Baghdad, according to Iraqi security officials. In the face of this and other sectarian attacks, Muslim preachers used sermons at Friday mosque services to call for an end to violence. Police said Kamal Ezz al-Deen al-Ghuraifi, a Baghdad representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had been gunned down on his way to Friday prayers at al-Doreen Mosque on Haifa Street, a dangerous neighborhood where Iraqi and U.S. officials say order is gradually being restored by Iraqi security forces. Two of al-Ghuraifi's bodyguards also were killed, according to a spokesman at al-Sistani's headquarters in Najaf, the Shiite holy city 90 miles south of Baghdad. "We cannot protect every scholar of Sistani. They number in the thousands, " the spokesman said. "We accuse the extremists. This is not the first time they have targeted a Sistani scholar." Conflict between Iraq's majority Shiites and the Sunni Arab minority that wielded power until the fall of President Saddam Hussein in 2003 has flared since al-Jaafari's Shiite-led government was formed in April. The country's nearly 2-year-old insurgency, which is driven by Sunni religious radicals and secular Sunnis loyal to Hussein, has included assassinations of political and religious leaders in the Shiite community as well as bomb attacks on Shiite neighborhoods. Sunni leaders have accused the Shiite-dominated security forces of using security crackdowns to settle sectarian scores. Since mid-June, Shiites have suffered the brunt of the violence. "The sectarian war is escalating, and the objective is to draw the Shiites into civil war," warned Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer, a Shiite cleric, in his Friday sermon at Baghdad's Buratha Mosque. He urged listeners not to use violence, because "if catastrophe struck, it would devastate everything. No one will benefit from it except the enemies of Iraq." A mortar attack sparked a fire Friday that forced authorities to shut down a Baghdad water plant, leaving millions of Iraqis with dry taps in 100- degree heat, Iraqi officials said. Just a day earlier, the mayor of the capital threatened to quit because of mounting infrastructure problems -- including a lack of clean drinking water. Baghdad's estimated 6.5 million people face frequent electricity outages, erratic fuel supplies, congested traffic, diminished public services and the ever-present threat of kidnappings and car bombings. The blaze at a power station north of Baghdad cut off electricity to a water plant serving northern and western parts of the capital, officials said. The fire halted all distribution from the waterworks, and project director Jassim Muhammad said repairs could take three days. A U.S. spokesman for Task Force Baghdad, Master Sgt. Greg Kaufman, said later that unexploded ordnance had been found in the area but that "we're still not sure" what had started the fire. U.S. and Iraqi military forces continued to try to drive insurgents out of towns in western Iraq. About 1,000 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors and 100 Iraqi troops conducted a fourth day of search operations in the town of Hit, about 95 miles northwest of Baghdad. The Marines said in a statement that the push, called Operation Sword, was meeting little resistance. |
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