Suicide attacks and drive-by shootings kill 34 across Iraq

Paul Garwood, Baghdad

Continuing violence during the past days also has claimed the lives of three children, a US soldier and a Sunni Muslim cleric, underscoring the rampant, random nature of an insurgency that has killed almost 800 people since the April 28 announcement of Iraq’s new Shi’ite-led government, according to an Associated Press count. Twenty people were killed as a wide swathe of northern Iraq was hit by three suicide bombings within an hour.

A suicide bomber struck a restaurant in Tuz Khormato, 50 miles south of the northern city of Kirkuk, during breakfast hours yesterday, killing at least 12 people, including a bodyguard of a deputy prime minister, and wounding 40, according to the Iraqi Defence Ministry and police.

The blast set ablaze eight cars in the restaurant’s parking lot, the focal point of a bloody, rubble-strewn scene that US and Iraqi police quickly cordoned off. Shards of glass, shoes and splattered breakfast meals covered the restaurant’s floor as emergency workers raced around overturned tables and wooden chairs in a bid to treat the casualties.

Earlier in Kirkuk, a suicide car bomber targeting a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers carrying civilian contractors killed four Iraqi bystanders and wounded at least 11 others, said Dr Bassam Mohammed of Kirkuk Emergency Hospital. None of the occupants in the convoy was injured, although one vehicle was damaged, the US military said.

Another suicide bomber killed four people and wounded four in Baqouba, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, police colonel Mudhafar Mohammed said. The victims included Hussein Alwan al-Tamimi, aged 41, deputy head of Iraq’s northeastern Diyala provincial council since January, and three of his bodyguards. Hours later, two parked motorcycles rigged with explosives detonated near a coffee shop frequented by policemen, killing five Iraqis, wounding 13 and destroying several shops in Mosul, police and hospital officials said.

Gunmen firing randomly from three speeding cars also killed nine Iraqis in a crowded market area in Baghdad, a Defence Ministry official said.

The attack occurred in the ethnically mixed northwestern neighbourhood of Hurriyah. “There were no security targets there, they were all civilians,” the ministry’s Radhi Badir said. Earlier this year, gunmen killed the governor of the Baghdad province and six of his bodyguards in a drive-by shooting in the area.

The massive explosion in Tuz Khormato tore apart the town’s Baghdad Restaurant, where bodyguards of Iraq’s Kurdish deputy prime minister, Rowsch Nouri Shaways, were eating, police Brig Sarhad Qadre said.

“I was sitting inside my restaurant when about six cars parked nearby and their passengers came inside and ordered food,” said restaurant owner Ahmed al-Dawoudi. “Seconds later, I heard a big explosion and the restaurant was turned into twisted wreckage and rubble. Blood and pieces of flesh were everywhere.”

Shaways was not at the restaurant at the time of the blast. Kurds, who want oil-rich Kirkuk to be part of their autonomous Kurdistan region, have been regularly targeted by insurgents.

The military also announced that a US soldier assigned to the Marines was killed when a roadside bomb struck the vehicle he was travelling in Wednesday near the volatile western Iraqi city of Ramadi.

Another American soldier, attached to Task Force Liberty, died of non-battle-related wounds Wednesday in the northern city of Kirkuk, the military said. The incident is under investigation.

At least 1,665 US military members have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

An Iraqi civilian also was killed and another wounded in a suicide bombing Wednesday near the village of Mishada, 20 miles north of the capital.

A suicide bomber tried but failed to attack a US convoy nearby.

A Sunni cleric, Imad al-Hayali, was “mistakenly” killed by an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint in Latifiyah, south of Baghdad, police Lt Adnan Abdullah said Thursday. Al-Hayali was shot Tuesday by soldiers who thought he was driving dangerously toward the checkpoint, Abdullah said.

A southern Baghdad mortar barrage late Wednesday killed 12-year-old Sabaa Haitham, her brother, Sajjad, aged 10, their 8-year-old cousin, Mina Mohammed Abid, and their uncle, Lu’ay Salih, in his mid-20s, hospital officials said.

In a bid to curb Iraq’s insurgency, Shi’ite leaders have started reaching out to Sunni Muslim insurgent groups believed responsible for multiple attacks.

Senior Shi’ite cleric Hummam Hammoudi, chairman of a committee named by the National Assembly to draw up Iraq’s constitution, said the Shi’ite-led government has opened indirect communications with factions in the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency and is trying to persuade them to lay down arms. “Some informal and limited contacts have been established with parties that we label ‘resistance’, so they can contribute to the drafting of the constitution,” said Hammoudi, a senior member of Iraq’s largest Shi’ite political party.