Posted on 06/19/2005 6:51:25 AM PDT by Jet Jaguar
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A suicide bombing ripped through a popular Baghdad kebab restaurant at lunchtime, killing at least 16 people and wounding 25 Sunday as insurgents stepped up attacks nationwide, defying two major U.S.-led offensives aimed at routing foreign fighters.
The bomber detonated a vest laden with explosives at about 2:45 p.m. in the Ibn Zanbour restaurant, which is just 400 yards from the main gate of the heavily fortified Green Zone and is especially popular with Iraqi police and soldiers.
Six police officers were among those killed, while the injured included 12 police officers, Iraqi army Maj. Falah Al-Mehmadawi said.
Elsewhere, militants staged a series of attacks that killed at least nine other people, despite two joint U.S.-Iraqi offensives - Operations Spear and Dagger - that began earlier this week with about 1,000 U.S. forces and Iraqi soldiers each.
Nearly 60 insurgents have been killed and 100 captured so far in the campaigns, which are aimed at destroying militant networks near the Syrian border and north of Baghdad, the military said. Three Americans have been wounded.
Troops participating in Operation Spear - in its third day in the Anbar province town of Karabilah - fired Hellfire missiles overnight at two homes where insurgents holed up after shooting mortars at coalition forces, said Lt. Col. Tim Mundy, who commands the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment. The military said they believed four or five militants may have been killed in the counterattack.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have been shouting through loudspeakers to residents of the western town to leave their homes with white flags and head to a safer area. But they have found that most of the town's homes are already empty, Marine Capt. Christopher Goland of Lima Company, a unit of the 3rd Battalion, said.
Dozens of buildings in Karabilah, 200 miles west of Baghdad, were destroyed after airstrikes and tank shelling, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.
Intelligence officials believe Anbar province is a portal used by extremist groups, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group, to smuggle in foreign fighters. Syria is under intense pressure from Washington and Baghdad to tighten control of its porous 380-mile border with Iraq.
The majority of the region's residents are Sunni Arabs, who are thought to make up the core of an insurgency that has killed at least 1,123 people since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's Shiite-led government was announced April 28.
On Saturday, troops searching the town found four Iraqi hostages beaten, handcuffed and chained to a wall in a torture center, the military said. Some of the men were believed to be Iraqi border guards. Troops searching the bunker found nooses, electrical wire and a bathtub filled with water for electric shocks and mock drownings.
U.S. and Iraqi forces also found a bomb-making factory with blasting caps, cell phones and other materials to make roadside and car bombs. They uncovered sniper rifles, ammunition and a mortar system. A nearby schoolhouse believed to be used for training terrorists had instructions for making roadside bombs written on a chalkboard.
A second offensive of similar size, Operation Dagger, was launched Saturday, targeting the marshy shores of a lake north of Baghdad. Dagger seeks to eliminate insurgent training camps and weapons caches in the Lake Tharthar area, 50 miles northwest of Baghdad.
Both operations come on the heels of two other major offensives in the same areas that killed about 125 militants earlier this month and in March.
But the western region has been flush with militants in recent weeks. Insurgents in the area killed 21 people, believed to be missing Iraqi soldiers, whose bodies were found June 10.
Iraqi troops did not participate in earlier offensives in the area. This time, they fought alongside the Americans and used their language skills and local knowledge to spot foreign fighters, said Col. Bob Chase, chief of operations for the Second Marine Division.
In other violence, a suicide car bomber killed two Iraqi soldiers and two civilian employees as construction workers were fixing the gate a security checkpoint in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, 80 miles north of Baghdad, Army Capt. Muhanad Ahmed said. Eight soldiers and four civilians were wounded in the attack.
A bomb in a car parked near the Shiite al-Nawab mosque also exploded in the northern Baghdad suburb of Kazimiyah, killing one civilian and wounding 27 people, police Maj. Falah al-Muhammadawi said.
Gunmen killed two Iraqi policemen in western Baghdad as they headed to work, while a second band of gunmen killed an electrical engineer who was on his way to work at an oil refinery in the Iraqi capital.
In the northern city of Mosul, two mortar rounds missed the governor's building and landed at a butcher's market, killing a 12-year-old boy and wounding 14, hospital officials said.
A series of clashes also left at least one person dead and two wounded in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad.
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Associated Press reporter Jacob Silberberg contributed to this report from Karabilah.
AP-ES-06-19-05 0851EDT
If they are reacting to our offensive, then it is having an effect on them. I hope we step up our efforts.
Agreed.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
It adds new meaning to shish-kebabs. It's the suicide bomber smoldering.
How the Iraqi people can put up with this, day after day, is beyond me. Why aren't they marching in the streets demaning these terrorists get out of town by noon or else? Have the Iraqi people been abused by Saddam for so long and now this terrorism, that they just don't know HOW to fight for themselves? G
Just a thought on this subject:
I had to take hubby into Sloan Kettering the other day, and we live in PA. While driving over the George Washington Bridge, I mentioned that all these bomber idiots in Iraq would have to do is drive a car loaded with stuff and sit it off in the middle of the bridge...hubby said that he was thinking the same thing.
When we got down to where we exit the Harlem River Drive to get to Sloan Kettering, he remarked to me, could you imagine what would happen to a city like this if they had to bombers killing themselves here?
I never thought about it before, never entered my mind until the other day and I couldn't wait to get out of New York and back home...its a very real, and a very scary thought.
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