Iraq suicide bombers kill 14

Suicide attackers carried out a string of car bombings against Iraqi policemen in Baghdad and Kurdish militiamen in the north, killing 14 people and wounding at least 59 today in the latest major assaults on Iraqi security forces and U.S. allies in the country.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed by roadside bombs today, and two other Americans died in a suicide car bombing of their post near the Jordanian border yesterday, the U.S. military said.

The attacks came after a day of increased violence yesterday, when attacks in Baghdad and the north killed 30 Iraqis – most of them policemen.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq acknowledged today that U.S. trained Iraqi security forces, though increasing in number, are not yet up to the increasingly difficult task of keeping security during vital elections set for January 30.

The U.S. military plans to increase its troop strength from 138,000 to about 150,000 by mid-January – slightly more than during the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime – in an attempt to keep order during the vote.

“It had been our hope that we would be able to have a combination of increases that mainly were Iraqi troops’ increases,” Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, said at a regional security conference in Bahrain.

And while the Iraqi troops numbers were larger than they used to be, the forces have to be seasoned more, trained more. “So, it’s necessary to bring more American forces,” he said.

In Baghdad, insurgents unleashed two suicide car bombs nearly simultaneously this morning at a police station just across the street from a checkpoint leading into the heavily-fortified Green Zone, the seat of American and Iraqi power in Baghdad.

Bursts of automatic fire followed the thunderous detonation, which shook windows several hundred yards away in buildings on the opposite side of the Tigris River.

Six policemen and another person were killed in the blast. Some 59 people were wounded, hospital officials said.

Adel Hassan, a policeman who survived the attack with head injuries, said at a hospital crammed with victims that a “suicide car bomber sped into our place (the police station) … and then there was an explosion.”

In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide bomber pulled his explosive-laden vehicle alongside a bus bringing Kurdish peshmerga fighters into the city. The attacker detonated the blast, killing seven militiamen from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said Saadi Ahmed, a PUK official.

The militiamen were being brought in from the mainly Kurdish city of Irbil to protect PUK offices in Mosul.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have been fighting insurgents who staged an uprising in the city last month, attacking police stations and offices of the Kurds, who are close U.S. allies.

In fierce fighting in the city on Friday, gunmen tried to storm four police stations but were repelled, the U.S. military said. About 70 guerrillas also ambushed a U.S. patrol. After regrouping, U.S. and Iraqi forces struck back on insurgent positions, killing more than two dozen fighters, the military said.

The interim government’s security forces are regular targets for insurgents, who have been increasing up attacks before the scheduled elections on January 30.

The latest attacks, however, were particularly audacious and sent a clear message that the insurgents can strike wherever they choose. Yesterday, 11 carloads of gunmen attacked a police station, killing 16 policemen, on the main road to Baghdad’s international airport, which has been extremely dangerous in spite of frequent patrols by U.S. troops.

Meanwhile, two American soldiers were killed today by roadside bombs – one in eastern Baghdad that wounded five other Americans, the other in the town of Ghalabiyah, 6 miles (10 kilometres) west of the insurgent hotbed of Baqouba, north of Baghdad, the military said.

A suicide car bomb hit an American forward operating base near Iraq’s border with Jordan on Friday, killing two U.S. service members.

The killings – along with two Americans who died in roadside bombs in Baghdad and Kirkuk on Friday – brought the number of U.S. military members to have died since the war began in March 2003 to at least 1,269, according to a county by the Associated Press.

Police in the northern city of Samarra also came under mortar and gun attacks that wounded four officers today, according to police Maj. Sadoon Ahmed Matroud.

A visiting NATO commander expressed surprise yesterday that Iraq’s insurgency had proven so resilient by comparison with Afghanistan, where he said security has improved significantly.

“At the beginning I would have projected the opposite, with Iraq coming along faster,” said U.S. Gen. James Jones, the supreme allied commander in Europe.

In Kirkuk, U.S. soldiers killed an Iraqi driver who didn’t slow down at a checkpoint set up following a rocket propelled grenade attack on a drinks store.