Iraq suicide attacks leave 30 dead
Foreign Desk Report

BAGHDAD—A suicide truck bombing at dusk in a small Shi’ite Muslim town killed 30 people and wounded 42, as Pentagon estimates showed that more than 60 Iraqis are killed or wounded every day by insurgent attacks. In a first partial public count of Iraqi casualties in the war, available on Sunday, the Pentagon estimated nearly 26,000 Iraqis were killed or wounded in attacks by insurgents since January 2004, with the daily number increasing fairly steadily.
In Saturday’s attack, the bomber parked a truck laden with dates in the center of Howaider and gathered a crowd of customers around the vehicle to buy the produce before he detonated a massive charge, police said. Among the dead were merchants breaking the daily Ramadan fast at sunset in their shops around the marketplace and people out enjoying the festive atmosphere of dusk in the holy month.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the targeting of Shi’ite civilians bore the marks of extreme Sunni Islamist militants like al Qaeda in Iraq and recalled an attack six weeks ago in Baghdad when a bomber gathered a crowd of Shi’ite day laborers seeking work and killed more than 100. Howaider, 8 km (5 miles) north of the provincial capital of Baquba some 70 km north of Baghdad, sits on the bank of the Diyala river and is renowned locally for the produce of the date palm groves that surround it.
Diyala province has a broad sectarian mix of Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims and has seen considerable violence launched by Sunni Arab insurgents opposed to the Shi’ite-led, US-backed government in Baghdad. US commanders in the province describe it as a “little Iraq” because of its mixed population, and campaigning there for a December 15 election is likely to be among the hardest fought in the country, with local tensions mirroring broader divisions.
Ethnic tensions in the northern city of Mosul crackled on Sunday after Sunni Arab police and armed Arab tribesmen took to the streets late on Saturday in protest at what they say is a Kurdish-dominated regional government. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a German magazine interview published on Sunday that US forces were making inroads on the insurgency, though he warned attacks might rise in the run-up to December’s elections.
The blast in Howaider came a day after a deadline for parties to register for the elections that Washington is hoping will set Iraq firmly on the path to peace and democracy, two and a half years after the US-led invasion. It also comes at the end of a week which saw the United States mark the 2,000th US military death in Iraq. Recent weeks have been marked by a relative lull in violence, despite an October 15 referendum and the start of Saddam Hussein’s trial for crimes against humanity.
Iraqi authorities and US commanders attribute the lull to a crackdown on insurgents. Individuals claiming to speak for some Sunni nationalist rebel groups have, however, said they had held back to encourage Sunnis to turn out and vote “No”. “The pressure applied on terrorists and insurgents is having an effect,” Rumsfeld told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. A Pentagon report to Congress said casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces rose from about 26 a day between January 1 and March 31, 2004, to about 64 a day between August 29 and September 16, 2005, just before the constitutional referendum.
The numbers exclude Iraqis killed or wounded by US forces, for which the Pentagon says it does not release data. The Pentagon has not previously provided such a comprehensive estimate of the Iraqi casualty toll from insurgent attacks. “Approximately 80 percent of all attacks are directed against Coalition Forces, but 80 percent of all casualties are suffered by Iraqis,” the report said. With the election looming, the coming week’s Eid holiday marking the end of Ramadan will be a wary time as crowds gather to celebrate, making an easy target. Among 21 coalitions registered for the ballot by Friday’s deadline were two main blocs of Sunni parties, in contrast to January elections when Sunni Arabs largely boycotted the vote.