Suicide bomber kills 21, wounds 40
The attack came as a leaked British government memo revealed US and British hopes to more than halve their troop numbers in Iraq over the next year.
Any such plan would rely on recruiting and training Iraqi forces to take over, but army recruits are a prime target for insurgents.
One Interior Ministry source put the death toll at Baghdad’s Muthanna airfield recruitment station at 22.
Police said 42 were wounded.
The Defence Ministry said 21 died.
The attack, claimed by al-Qaida’s Iraq wing in an internet posting, was the bloodiest in Iraq for a week, since an almost identical attack on police recruits at another Baghdad base.
A twin suicide car bombing killed seven Iraqi customs officers at the Waleed border crossing from Syria.
A suicide car bomber killed three civilians and wounded 10 others near the local authority building in the northern oil city of Kirkuk.
Five police were killed and three wounded near Mosul when a suicide bomber hit the motorcade of a district police chief.
The Muthanna airfield recruitment station, near Baghdad’s city centre, has been struck before, part of a sustained campaign by Sunni Arab insurgents against the Shi’ite-led government’s fledgling security forces.
Those troops and police are a vital element in Washington’s publicly proclaimed strategy of withdrawing its 140,000 or so troops over time and putting Iraqis in the front line of fighting the revolt among the once-dominant Sunni minority.
The leaked British government memo, published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, described plans by Washington and London to cut their forces in Iraq by more than half by mid-2006, turning over territory to Iraqi forces to control.
The British government said that the memo reflected just one possible scenario.
A spokesman for the Pentagon, which has said the war could last years, said it had not decided upon a schedule for withdrawal.
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