Suicide Attack Kills 13 in Iraq
Gunmen Assassinate Senior Education Ministry Official
By Jackie Spinner and Edward Cody
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 13, 2004; 3:10 PM
BAGHDAD, June 13 -- A pair of car bombings killed a U.S. soldier and 12 Iraqis Sunday and gunmen assassinated a senior Education Ministry official in a continuing a wave of violence against the U.S. occupation and Iraqis who cooperate with it.
Three rockets were fired into the heavily guarded compound where U.S. authorities live and work in downtown Baghdad. A senior U.S. military official said only one of the rockets detonated, causing minor damage and no deaths or injures. But the blast resonated through the city during morning rush hour, driving home its political message.
As the attacks persisted in Baghdad, a senior spokesman for the insurgent Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr said in Najaf that Sadr intends to "found a party to participate in political events." The spokesman, Qais Kazali, did not say whether Sadr also intends to disband his militia, the Mehdi Army, and abandon his military resistance to the U.S. occupation.
The suggestion of a political organization was in line with intense efforts by Shiite religious and political figures to persuade the young cleric to abandon his military challenge to U.S. forces and turn instead to politics. Despite a declared U.S. determination to force Sadr to stand trial on charges he conspired in a fellow cleric's murder, these Iraqi Shiite leaders repeatedly have said the answer is to draw Sadr into the political process and that confrontation can only lead to more bloodshed such as the country suffered Sunday.
The first car bombing, in the eastern part of the capital as Iraqis drove to work in a morning traffic jam, killed four policemen and eight civilians, the U.S. military said. The second, later in the day near the northern suburb of Taji, killed one U.S. soldier and wounded two, spokesmen reported.
About 15 vehicles rigged with explosives, some driven to their targets by suicide bombers, have been sent against U.S. occupation and Iraqi government targets so far this month, U.S. military officers said, meaning an average of at least one car-bombing a day somewhere in Iraq. The bombings were among a range of violent engagements that occur at the rate of 35-40 a day in a campaign designed to demonstrate a lack of U.S. and government control in days leading to restoration of Iraqi sovereignty June 30, they said.
A Lebanese Foreign Ministry official, Mohammed Issa, told the Associated Press in Beirut that the body of a Lebanese construction worker, identified as Hussein Ali Alyan, was found Saturday near Fallujah, just west of Baghdad. Alyan and two other Lebanese citizens had been kidnapped earlier, Issa said. One of the two was freed and the other is still missing, he added.
Fallujah, a center of resistance to the occupation by radical Sunni Muslim nationalists, was also where seven Turkish construction workers were freed Saturday after spending several days in captivity. An estimated 40 foreigners have been abducted in the last two months as part of the campaign against the occupation; a number have been released and several were freed by coalition troops.
The assassinations were also believed to be aimed at frightening away Iraqis who cooperate with the U.S. occupation by participating in the interim government and its institutions, particularly the police and armed forces. With ministers and senior officials increasingly restricted to life behind concrete barriers and a U.S. security belt, the killings have begun to descend the official hierarchy to lower ranking officials with less protection.
Iraqi police reported Sunday, for instance, that Sabri Bayati, a professor who headed the geography department at Baghdad University, was shot and killed by unknown gunmen as he left the campus. Amer Nayef Hiti, who teaches at the university's language department, said a number of professors have received written threats from unknown people warning them that if they continue teaching they will be killed.
The assassinated Education Ministry official, Kamal Jarrah, 63, headed cultural relations with foreign countries and the United Nations. Gunmen shot him dead as he left for work from his home in the Ghazaliya district, police said. He suffered four or five bullets in the torso, the U.S. military reported.
Jarrah was the second ranking government professional to be killed by gunfire in as many days. Assassins killed Bassam Kubba, a senior Foreign Ministry official and career diplomat, in a hail of fire Saturday as he drove away from his home on the way to work.
Kubba, 60, a deputy foreign minister, had worked at the ministry since 1968. He served as former president Saddam Hussein's ambassador to China and was the chief of Iraq's mission to the United Nations. He was on a committee that ran the Foreign Ministry after Hussein's overthrow last year.
The rotating head of the former Iraqi Governing Council, Izzedin Salim, was killed in a suicide car-bombing May 17 at an entrance to the heavily guarded headquarters of the occupation authority. Four days later a car bomb exploded outside the home of Abdul-Jabbar Youssef Sheikhli, a deputy minister in Iraq's interior minister, wounding him and his wife and killing five civilians.
Sunday's suicide bombing, which also wounded 12 civilians and a policeman, took place near a U.S. military camp in the eastern part of the capital, the U.S. military said. Witnesses told reporters an Iraqi police patrol tried to stop the vehicle as it sped toward Camp Cuervo, but it crossed the median line and detonated, demolishing the police car.
In Baqubah, 35 miles to the northeast, the dean of Diyala University, Khosham Atta, escaped injury when gunmen shot at his car as he went to work.
In northern Iraq overnight, gunmen killed Iyad Khorshid, a Kurdish religious leader, Reuters reported. Four gunmen broke into his house and shot him, the news service said. Khorshid had condemned the violence against U.S. and coalition forces.
"These random, senseless acts of violence only prove that anti-Iraqi forces have no regard for the people of Baghdad or the future of this country," said Lt. Col. James Hutton, a spokesman for the 1st Cavalry Division based at Camp Cuervo. "The Iraqi people will not be denied their future or their freedom."
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