Bombings, shootings kill 33 in Iraq
Middle East Deskk Report

TIKRIT (Iraq)—Bombings and shootings in central Iraq and Baghdad, including twin suicide truck bomb attacks on leading figures in the fight against Al-Qaeda, killed at least 33 Iraqis on Tuesday, officials said.
At dawn two suicide bombers blew up fuel-laden trucks against the homes of an Iraqi police chief and a tribal leader in simultaneous bombings in Baiji city in central Salaheddin province, police said.
The attacks just minutes and about a kilometre (less than a mile) apart killed 19 people and wounded at least 50 people, police commander Ali al-Bijwari told AFP. They were aimed at local police chief Colonel Saad al-Nifous and Thamer Ibrahim Atallah, a tribal leader at the forefront of the fight against Al-Qaeda. Both escaped unharmed though members of their families were killed.
The trucks were loaded with barrels of gasoline and caused massive fireballs when they exploded. Violence also raged in Baghdad, where at least 12 people were killed and more than 60 wounded in four bomb blasts, including one which ripped through crowds in a central square, Iraqi officials said.
In northern Mosul city, the deputy commander of Nineveh police, Brigadier General Abdul Aal Thannoun Mubarak was killed when unidentified gunmen attacked his convoy, police said. Another policeman was killed in a car bomb attack on a police patrol in Mosul, that also wounded two other officers.
The attacks come a day after a suicide bomber killed 14 people when he exploded his truck at a police post near another town in Salaheddin province, Samarra, midway between Baiji and Baghdad.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq had warned it would ramp up attacks during the holy month of Ramadan, which ends this week. It also warned it would target Iraqis who join US forces in fighting local members of Osama bin Laden’s global jihadist group.
Among the dead in Tuesday’s twin suicide bomb attacks were four women and three children, police official Bijwari said. He was not able to say exactly how many were killed and wounded in each incident.
The first bomb exploded at the home of police chief Nifous, killing at least seven people, including his uncle and two nephews. Minutes later, a second suicide truck bomber crashed his explosives-packed truck into the house of Atallah, who escaped the attack. The identities of those killed and wounded were not immediately clear.
A small mosque next to the house collapsed under the impact of the blast. Atallah is the third member of the Salaheddin Awakening Council, a coalition of tribes in the Tikrit district formed to fight Al-Qaeda, to come under attack in less than a week.
Last Thursday, a roadside bomb near Samarra killed the leader of the council, Sheikh Maawia Naji Jebara, and wounded his deputy Sheikh Sabah Mutashar al-Shimmary. The attack on their convoy was claimed by an Al-Qaeda group in a statement posted on the Internet.
Leading Iraqi Sunni cleric Harith al-Dhari, meanwhile, urged Iraqis not to join US forces in fighting Al-Qaeda, arguing that by doing so they are siding with the occupier.
“We do not accept the acts of Al-Qaeda,” said Dhari, head of the influential Muslim Scholars’ Association, Iraq’s main Sunni clerics’ organisation.
“We reject their ideas but Al-Qaeda remains part of us and we are part of it. Ninety percent of Al-Qaeda members are now Iraqis,” Dhari said in an interview with Qatari-based television channel Al-Jazeera posted Tuesday on the website of the Muslim Scholars’ Association.
“A decision to stand beside the occupying enemy in order to achieve a wish to stay in Iraq under the pretext of destroying Al-Qaeda is neither accepted legally nor on patriotic or rational grounds.”
Tuesday’s attack comes almost four weeks after prominent tribal leader Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha was killed by a roadside bomb in Ramadi, capital of western Anbar province.