Bombs kill 16 in attacks across Iraq
Middle East Desk Report

BAGHDAD—Bombs killed at least 16 people Thursday in attacks across the Iraqi capital and its northern suburbs. U.S. and Iraqi troops arrested 85 suspected insurgents in operations around the country.
Police said a roadside bomb killed five people near a shelter used as a police recruiting center in northeast Baghdad’s Shiite-dominated neighborhood of Binouk. Six other people were wounded, they said. Most of the victims were recruits lining up outside the shelter.
In Balad Ruz, an ethnically mixed city 45 miles northeast of the capital, another roadside bomb exploded near a convoy carrying the police chief of Balad Ruz, Col. Faris al-Amirie, police said. Six of al-Amirie’s guards were killed and eight others were hurt, but the chief escaped injury, they said.
In Sadiyah, 60 miles north of Baghdad, police said a cluster of three attacks took place around 10:40 a.m., killing five people and wounding 18 others. The U.S. military announced the deaths of two American soldiers, killed by an explosion near their vehicle in Iraq’s northern Ninevah province. Two other soldiers were wounded by the blast, which occurred Wednesday, the military said in a statement.
At least 3,844 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. The Iraqi raids took place over the past three days in Jbala, about 45 miles south of the Iraqi capital, and in the Hamrin mountains in northeastern Iraq, near the border with Iran, the government said in two statements.
Thirty-four suspects were arrested in Jbala, and 39 in the Hamrin area, the government said. In Hamrin, Iraqi troops also safely detonated six booby-trapped cars and destroyed a hospital that had been taken over by insurgents in the village of al-Bu Talha, it said. The U.S. military said American soldiers detained 12 suspects in raids in central and northern Iraq.
The military also said Thursday that it discovered a weapons cache in Turki village near Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad. The stash was found Monday and included 20 rocket-propelled grenades, ten mortar rounds and three hand grenades, the military said.
Many in Iraq, meanwhile, were increasingly concerned about the threat of attacks by Turkey against the country’s northern Kurdish areas.
Iraqis worry that a Turkish cross-border campaign, provoked by Kurdish rebel attacks, would spread disorder in one of the few relatively stable areas in Iraq. A Turkish incursion also would put the United States in the middle of a fight between key allies: NATO-member Turkey, the Baghdad government and the Iraqi Kurds of Iraq’s semi-independent Kurdistan region.
Turkey’s foreign minister said Thursday that any incursion by Turkish forces into Iraq would target Kurdish guerrilla fighters and their bases and “would not be an invasion.”
Ali Babacan said a meeting Monday between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Bush “will determine the steps that Turkey would take.” But if Turkey sends its troops into Iraq, “any cross-border attack would be aimed at hitting terrorist bases and would not be an invasion,” he said.
He also said some economic measures aimed at rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in northern Iraq were in place, and Turkey is also considering stopping flights to the region.
A lawmaker from the Kurdish bloc in Iraq’s parliament, Bayazed Hassan Abdullah, said Thursday that he worried such sanctions would end up hurting businesses in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region with no links to the rebels.
“It will not be good, and it’ll be a loss for the Turkish government too,” Abdullah told The Associated Press. “It will affect the Kurdish region because there are strong economic relations between Kurdistan and the Turkish government.”