March 20, 2005
At Least 30 Killed on a Violent Day in Iraq
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 20 - Insurgent attacks flared across Iraq today,
exactly two years after the American military began its campaign to
topple Saddam Hussein.
The attacks showed that the guerrilla war still burns fiercely here,
long after President Bush proclaimed major combat operations to be over
and despite a high turnout among Iraqis in the Jan. 30 elections. In
what appeared to be a pitched battle, insurgents and American forces
fought at noon on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American military said
that 24 insurgents were killed and seven wounded, and six American
soldiers were injured. It did not give more details.
Tensions between the Iraqi and Jordanian governments exploded again
today, as each government called home its envoy from the neighboring
country. Leaders of the two countries have been at odds since Shiite
politicians in Iraq called for protests against a Jordanian man whom a
Jordanian newspaper said last week may have been involved in a recent
suicide car bombing. That attack killed at least 136 people in the town
of Hilla, the worst death toll of any single bombing here.
In Amman, a military court sentenced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian
militant who is the most wanted man in Iraq, to 15 years of hard labor
for his role in planning the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad
in August 2003, news agencies reported. An associate of Mr. Zarqawi's
who had been detained by the Jordanian authorities was sentenced to
three years in prison. Mr. Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for
ambushes, bombings and beheadings that have killed hundreds in Iraq, and
the American government has placed a $25 million bounty on him.
The American soldier who died today was killed by a roadside bomb while
on patrol in the morning near the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, the
military said. At least 1,520 American soldiers have died in the war.
Three other soldiers were injured in the attack. The explosion came a
day after three Iraqi police officers were killed in Kirkuk in the
bombing of a funeral procession of a police officer who was fatally shot
on Friday.
Kirkuk is at the center of an intense political struggle now, as the
country's leading Shiite and Kurdish parties struggle to cobble together
a coalition government in the wake of the Jan. 30 elections. The Kurds
are insisting that the Shiite parties promise to quickly restore
property to tens of thousands of Kurds whom Saddam Hussein's government
evicted from Kirkuk. That would in turn reinforce the Kurdish domination
of Kirkuk's demographics and strengthen the Kurdish argument that Kirkuk
- and its oil fields - should be administered by the Kurdistan Regional
Government.
This morning, a suicide bomber in the northern city of Mosul detonated
himself in the offices of Brig. Gen. Walid Kashmoula, the head of the
anti-corruption department of the local Iraqi police force. The
explosion killed General Kashmoula and one other person, whose body was
reduced to scattered bits of flesh, according to a health official in
Mosul. The Interior Ministry reported that a total of three police
officers had been killed.
American and Iraqi officials in Mosul have been struggling to rebuild
the local police force after virtually all the police officers quit
their jobs following an insurgent uprising last November.
Other attacks rippled through Iraq. In the volatile city of Samarra,
north of Baghdad, insurgents gunned down a police officer walking to
work, The Associated Press reported, citing police officials. Police who
came to collect the body got into a firefight with the attackers, and
three police officers and three insurgents were wounded. Earlier this
month, American and Iraqi soldiers conducted an offensive sweep through
Samarra, only to find that many insurgents they were looking for had
fled or gone into hiding.
In the southern city of Basra, a roadside bomb explosion aimed at a
police patrol killed a civilian and injured a police officer. In the
town of Mahmudiya, insurgents lobbed mortars at an Iraqi Army base,
killing one civilian and wounding two others outside the walls of the base.
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