Ramadan rampage sees 40 die

The feared Ramadan rampage was launched in Baghdad today but on a scale that the American occupiers had not expected and not seen since major combat was declared over in May.

Suicide car bombers struck the International Red Cross headquarters and four police stations in co-ordinated attacks across the Iraqi capital, killing about 40 people in a spree of destruction that terrorised the city on the first day of the Muslim holy month.

The Red Cross said 12 were killed at their HQ, and police said 27 were killed in the police station bombings, most of them Iraqis.

The US military said one American soldier was killed in one of the police station attacks.

The bombings came hours after clashes in the Baghdad area killed three American soldiers and a day after insurgents devastated a hotel full of US occupation officials with a rocket barrage, killing a colonel and wounding 18 other people.

It was two days of violence unprecedented in the city of five million people since President George Bush declared an end to major hostilities in May.

The attacks were aimed at the American-led occupation and those perceived as working with it.

“We feel helpless when see this,” a distraught Iraqi doctor said at the devastated Red Cross offices.

At the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross in central Baghdad, witnesses said a suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed ambulance, right up to security barriers outside the building at about 8:30am and detonated it, blowing down the Red Cross’s front wall, devastating the interior and blowing shrapnel and debris over a wide area.

The ICRC said at its headquarters in Geneva that 12 people were killed, including two of its Iraqi employees.

Baghdad ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said she believed the employees were security guards.

Then, through the morning, four other vehicles exploded at police stations in the Baghdad area.

Ambulances, sirens wailing, criss-crossed the city all morning.

The explosions outside police stations left streetscapes of broken, bloody bodies and twisted, burning vehicles.

Iraqi police reported seven people killed in those attacks, including 15 Iraqis at the ad-Doura station in southern Baghdad.

One American soldier was among them, and other Americans were wounded. Teams of US military police have been stationed at Baghdad police stations in recent months.

At a fifth police station in central Baghdad, officers stopped a suicide bomber before he could detonate his Land Cruiser. “He was shouting, ‘Death to the Iraqi police! You’re collaborators!”’ said police Sergeant Ahmed Abdel Sattar.

Brigadier General Mark Hertling said he believed the attacks may have been timed with the start of Ramadan in order to heighten tensions during the fasting month, when Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight hours and religious feelings run high.

Near the three-story ICRC building, cigarette vendor Ghani Khadim, 50, said he saw an Iraqi ambulance pass by his stand and approach the small compound some 100 yards away.

It suddenly exploded, he said, and the blast blew out windows and injured his wife and daughter in his house behind his stand.

The vehicle had stopped 60 feet in front of the Red Cross headquarters, “at a line of barrels we have had in front to protect the building,” said one Red Cross employee.

The blast blew down a 40 foot section of the ICRC front wall, demolished a dozen cars in the area and apparently broke a water main, flooding the streets.

The inside of the building was heavily damaged, littered with shattered glass, doors blown off their hinges, toppled bookcases and collapsed ceilings. A gaping crack had opened in a back wall, 100 yards from the blast site, where a crater some five yards across quickly filled with water.

The Red Cross staff member said someone began firing off an automatic weapon immediately after the explosion – “100 bullets or more.”

He said he believed it was a gunmen somehow associated with the bomber “who wanted to scare people more.”

Spokeswoman Doumani said “Of course we don’t understand why somebody would attack the Red Cross. The Red Cross has operated in this country since 1980, and we have not been involved in politics.”

Two buildings away, the explosion devastated the interior of the Al-Nawal private clinic operated by Dr Jamal Massa, 53, who had been planning to open it as a full-fledged hospital next month.

“We feel helpless when we see this,” he said. He said he couldn’t understand why the Red Cross would be attacked, since it had even reduced its foreign staff recently. ”This only hurts guards and other Iraqis.”

The Red Cross and other international aid organisations had reduced their Baghdad staffs after the August car bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad in which 23 people died in what appeared to be a warning against international support for the US occupation.

Mouwafak al-Rabii, a Shiite Muslim member of the US appointed Iraqi Governing Council, said the United States must speed up the training of Iraqi police and soldiers and employ ruthless measures to crush the insurgency.

“There is no doubt about it that we need to change the rules of engagement with these people,” al-Rabii said. ”The rules of engagement now are too lenient.”