36 killed in Baghdad suicide blasts

A TEAM of suicide car bombers, bent on death for “collaborators,” devastated the Red Cross headquarters and three police stations yesterday, killing 36 people and wounding more than 200 in the bloodiest day in Baghdad since the start of the US occupation.

From north to south in this city of five million, the explosions over a 45-minute period left streetscapes of broken bodies, twisted wreckage and Iraqis unnerved by an escalating underground war. The dead included a US soldier, eight Iraqi policemen and at least 26 Iraqi civilians.

"We feel helpless when we see this," said an Iraqi doctor.

Iraqi and US authorities in Baghdad blamed the co-ordinated quadruple blasts on foreign fighters intent on targeting those they accuse of collaborating with US forces. One captive would-be bomber was said to carry a Syrian passport.

But in Washington, Pentagon officials said they believed loyalists of ousted President Saddam Hussein were responsible. President Bush said insurgents had become more "desperate" because of what he said was progress in Iraq.

The tactics suggested a level of organisation that US officials had doubted the resistance possessed. In past weeks, bombers have carried out heavy suicide bombings but in single strikes.

Not only were yesterday's attacks co-ordinated, they also involved disguise: the use of an Iraqi ambulance in the Red Cross attack, a police car and uniform in a police station explosion.

The blasts, which echoed the August 19 bombing of the UN headquarters in the city, forced the Red Cross to begin pulling foreign staff out of the capital.

The differing theories about who was behind the bombings underscored the confusion generated by two days of bold, stunning attacks, beginning with a rocket barrage on a US headquarters hotel on Sunday that killed a US colonel, wounded 15 other people and sent Americans scurrying to safety, including visiting Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Later on Sunday, three US soldiers were killed in two attacks in the Baghdad area.

Then, at 8.30am yesterday, on a warm, clear morning beginning the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, the first of four thunderous explosions rocked the city.

A police car, somehow commandeered for a suicide mission and driven by a man in police uniform, blew up after entering the courtyard of the al-Baya'a police station in southern Baghdad, said police Brigadier General Ahmed Ibrahim, the deputy interior minister.

Officers said the blast killed 15 Iraqis and one US soldier, and the US military said six other Americans were wounded. American troops have been working with Iraqi police and guarding the stations.

Just five minutes later, a second blast struck the local headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, a small, three-story building on a quiet street in central Baghdad. This bomber, too, used a subterfuge an Iraqi ambulance that apparently was able to approach the ICRC offices without suspicion.

The vehicle stopped 60 feet from the front of the Red Cross building, at a protective line of earth-filled barrels, and disintegrated as it blew a 15-foot-wide crater in the road.

More than 100 staff members normally would have been inside, but starting time had been changed to 9am because of Ramadan, and probably only one-quarter of the normal staff was present.

Red Cross headquarters in Geneva said 12 people were killed, only two of them employees, believed to be security guards, and the rest apparently passers-by.

The Red Cross and other aid organisations reduced their Baghdad staffs after the car bombing at UN headquarters that killed 23 people.

Forty minutes later suicide bombers had targeted two other police stations.

Last night, another soldier was killed in a mortar attack on a prison on the western outskirts of the city.

Besides the dead, at least 224 people were reported wounded in the four attacks, including 65 policemen. At 10.15am, yet another bombing was attempted, at a police station in the eastern district of New Baghdad, where officers managed to spot and stop a Land Cruiser driver from detonating his explosives.

The man set off a grenade that wounded an officer and himself, and when he was seized, "he was shouting, 'Death to the Iraqi police! You're collaborators,'" said police Sergeant Ahmed Abdel Sattar.

The latest attacks illustrated the disparate nature of the resistance from hit-run guerrillas, perhaps Saddam loyalists, to bombers, perhaps Islamic extremists, staging suicide strikes. The resistance also includes Iraqis who simply resent the US presence.