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BAGHDAD: Bombs stashed in vehicles killed 24 people
in the suburbs of Baghdad on Sunday, while two US helicopters
crashed after an apparent mid-air collision that left two American
soldiers dead.
In a coordinated attack designed
to inflict maximum casualties and which left 18 people dead, one
booby-trapped car blew up outside a restaurant before the second
ripped through a market in the Al-Shurta al-Arabaa district.
“Of those killed 10 are men,
five women and three children,” a medic at Yarmuk Hospital in the
Iraqi capital told AFP, adding that 35 wounded were receiving
treatment, several of them also women and children.
The first day of the Iraqi
working week was also marred when a suicide bomber blew himself up
in a minibus, killing six people and wounding 10 in Baghdad’s
northern and predominantly Shiite district of Al-Utaifiyah.
A security official said the bus
had been heading towards the Shiite western district of Kadhimiyah,
when it blew up.
Every day insurgents bomb packed
population areas in a bid to undermine a massive Iraqi and US
military crackdown that has deployed tens of thousands of troops to
the capital’s streets in an operation now being extending
elsewhere.
Two helicopters came down in the
early hours of the morning in a rural area southwest of Taji, home
to a huge American military base north of the capital in an area
where US aircraft have often come under fire from insurgents.
“An investigation will be
conducted to determine the cause of the incident; however, initial
reports indicate it appears to be from mid-air collision and not the
result of enemy fire,” the military said in a statement.
Twelve US choppers, including two
operated by a private security firm, have come down in Iraq since
January 20, most of them as a result of enemy fire.
Four combat helicopters also came
under fire during fighting between ground forces and insurgents last
week, in the most sustained clashes since Iraqi and US troops
launched a massive security crackdown two months ago.
The latest fatalities brought the
US military’s losses in Iraq to 3,295 since the 2003 invasion,
according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
The relentless climb in
casualties with little sign that overall violence is falling has
fuelled increasing American calls for US troops to be withdrawn.
The death toll from a suicide car
bomb attack in the central Shiite shrine city of Karbala also rose
overnight to 42, a local health official said.
“Forty-two people were killed
in the blast, including eight children,” said Salim Kadhim,
spokesman for Karbala health department.
Kadhim said Saturday’s attack,
in which a bomber exploded his car near a shopping area close to the
revered Shiite shrine of Imam Hussein, also wounded 224 people,
including 138 men and 86 women.
The wounded men included five
Iranian pilgrims.
Police have imposed a vehicle
curfew in the city, which is a magnet for hundreds of thousands of
Shiite pilgrims across the world.
Shiite-populated areas and
Shiite-led government forces are frequently targeted by car and
suicide bombings in Iraq, gripped by a Sunni-based insurgency and
sectarian conflict.
On Thursday, a suicide bomber
blew himself up in the parliament cafeteria in a spectacular breach
of the multiple layers of security in Baghdad’s Green Zone that
houses the government, the US mission and other foreign embassies.
An alliance of Sunni groups
headed by al-Qaeda in Iraq said on the Internet it had kidnapped 20
Iraqi soldiers and policemen and threatened to kill them in 48 hours
unless Sunni women in interior ministry prisons were not released.
An interior ministry spokesman
could not immediately confirm whether any officers were
missing.
 --AFP
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