At least 25 killed in Iraqi violence

A suicide bomber rammed a police checkpoint in northern Iraq with an explosives-laden vehicle today, killing more than a dozen people, the deadliest attack on a day when at least 25 people died in violence around the country.

More victims of Iraq’s Shiite-Sunni violence were found, with seven bullet-riddled bodies in Baghdad, where US and Iraqi troops have been trying for more than a month to put down sectarian killings in an intensified neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood sweep.

One American soldier with the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, died on Friday while conducting operations near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, the military said.

The suicide attack took place in Tal Afar, 260 miles north-west of Baghdad and about 30 miles from the Syrian border.

Fourteen people – including four policemen and 10 civilians – were killed when the vehicle detonated after speeding into the checkpoint at 8:45am, police Brig. Sabah al-Maamari said. Some of them died when parts of nearby homes collapsed from the forc of the blast. Four soldiers and nine civilians were wounded.

In the nearby city of Mosul, gunmen killed a woman who was walking with her 5-year-old son, Mosul police Col. Abdel-Karim al-Jubouri said. The boy was not harmed, he said.

The US military had predicted a spike in violence with the onset of Ramadan two weeks ago – something that the chief US military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said had been borne out.

“Unfortunately, as expected, attacks have steadily increased in Baghdad during these past weeks,” he said on Wednesday, adding that the number of car bombs found and cleared were at an all-time high.

A roadside bomb hit a fuel tanker being escorted by American troops early in the morning near Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, sending plumes of black smoke into the air. There were no reports of casualties, the US command said.

Two bodies were fished out of the Tigris River in central Baghdad, said police Lt. Bilal Ali Majid. Both had their hands and legs bound and showed signs of torture – hallmarks of the sectarian death squads that roam the capital.

Later in the south-eastern suburbs of the apital, the bodies of five more people who had been shot and handcuffed were discovered, police Cap. Mahir Hamad Mousa said.

Two workers at a Shiite-run bakery in Baghdad’s Mansour district were killed by unknown gunmen in the early afternoon, said police Lt. Maitham Abdel Razzaq. The gunmen got out of theircar, sprayed the bakery with bullets – also injuring a third person – and then fled in their car, he said.

The US has put increasing pressure on the government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to take action to sto sectarian violence amid deep divisions within his Cabinet between Shiite and Sunni parties. Sunnis complain Maliki is hesitant to take tough action against Shiite militias because many of them are linked to parties he relies on.

In a joint statement, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambasador to Iraq and Gen. George W. Casey, the top American military commander in the country, pledged to help the government find those behind Thursday’s killing of a Kurdish lawmaker.

Mohammed Ridha Mahmoud and his driver were seized and killed after they left the north-east Baghdad offices of a government agency that oversees Sunni mosques in an apparent sectarian attack, which a Sunni Kurdish party blamed on Shiite militias.

“The terrorists who carried out this attack are the enemies of the Iraqi people, desperate to derail the progress Iraq is making toward freedom and prosperity,” Casey and Khalilzad said.

“Although they killed Mr. Mahmoud, they cannot kill the vision he shared with the Iraqi people of a stable, secure, and unified Iraq,” they said. “We pledge to work with and support the Government of Iraq and Iraqi Security Forces to capture and prosecute these murderers with the swiftest justice afforded under the Iraqi law,” they said.

Elsewhere around the country, in a two morning raids in the province of Diyala, an increasingly violent region north of Baghdad, Iraqi forces killed two al Qaida suspects and captured 40 others, said Brig. Passim al-Macaw, spokesman for the General Command of the Armed Forces – the prime minister’s military office.

Five more insurgents were captured in a joint US-Iraqi operation in Mahaweel, 35 miles south of Baghdad, said police Capt. Muthana Khalid.

Meanwhile, the US command said it had captured 28 suspected terrorists in a series of nine raids early Tuesday in the Jisr Diyala neighbourhood of south-eastern Baghdad. Among those were three “high value individuals, including the No 9 person on the division’s high-value target list.”

No names were released, but the military said the top suspect was alleged to be responsible for murders and other criminal activities, and attacks on US and Iraqi forces.