final throes, chapter 872
"52 Die in Iraq, Including 2 in Attack on Newspaper
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 27 — A suicide car bomber attacked Iraq’s largest newspaper here today, detonating his vehicle inside its fortified compound in downtown Baghdad and killing two people and injuring 20 others, the paper’s executive editor and government officials said.
The bombing was part of a violent day across Iraq in which explosions and gun battles killed at least 52 people, including an American soldier.
In Baghdad, a bomb planted inside a Baghdad commuter bus blew up near the pedestrian entrance to downtown hotel, killing nine people and injuring 20 others, and a convoy ferrying a deputy defense minister came under heavy gunfire that wounded two bodyguards, two government officials said.
Today’s bombing of the office of Al-Sabah, a newspaper financed the Shiite-led Iraqi government, also destroyed more than a dozen vehicles and collapsed a quarter of the building where journalists and printing press operators work, said the executive editor, Falah al-Mishaal.
The attack occurred at 8:30 a.m. local time, after guards carrying automatic assault rifles grew suspicious of the vehicle after it had already been cleared to enter the newspaper’s parking lot, Mr. Mishaal said in an interview. Before the bomber could be shot, he blew up his vehicle, sending at least two parked cars through the building’s wall.
“Tomorrow we will return to work again,” he said.
The attack was the second on Al-Sabah — the word means morning in Arabic — in three months. On May 6, a suicide bomber in a car detonated at the newspaper’s main vehicle checkpoint, killing one and injuring several others, Mr. Mishaal said.
Mr. Mishaal blamed the attacks on Iraqi insurgent and foreign terrorist groups, including the successor group to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was killed in an American airstrike in June.
“The terrorists are trying to stop the media project in Iraq,” he said in an interview last month. “We have received many threats from Zarqawi’s assistants. We published them in the newspaper.”
He said today’s bombing also came in retaliation for his newspaper’s organizing a meeting of Iraqi television and newspaper editors this month to sign a “pledge of honor” to respect the government’s reconciliation efforts and to avoid printing or broadcasting inflammatory statements or violent images.
“This is an attack against all Iraqi media,” Mr. Mishaal said in a telephone interview. “It is a kind of challenge and an attempt to get rid of all free Iraqi media.”
At least 16 journalists working for the Iraqi Media Network, which also includes a government-run Baghdad television station, have been killed since 2003, media executives here said.
In a statement, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, “strongly denounced” the attack on Al Sabah, which he called “a pioneering media organization confronting terror, serving the truth and consolidating unity and national coherence.” Mr. Maliki vowed to capture the people behind the bombing.
In remarks closely following similarly upbeat statements by American military officials in Baghdad, the prime minister also sought today to offer an optimistic view of his government’s efforts to bring security to Baghdad and other violent parts of the country, and to rule out the possibility of civil war.
“The violence is not increasing,” Mr. Maliki said. “We are not in a civil war. Iraq will never be in a civil war,” The Associated Press quoted Mr. Maliki saying, through an interpreter, in an interview on CNN today. “The violence is in decrease and our security ability is increasing.”
His statement stood in distinct contrast to a far bleaker assessment he made in a speech to the Iraqi Parliament on July 12, when he said the country had one “last chance” to eliminate the sectarian and insurgent attacks destabilizing the country, and warned lawmakers that “if that fails — God forbid — I don’t know what will be Iraq’s fate.”
Also today, an Iraqi government official said the prison at Abu Ghraib, which became notorious for the abuse of Iraqi inmates by American soldiers, had been emptied of inmates and was now under the control of the Iraqi Justice Ministry.
Saad Sultan, the supervisor of detention facilities in the government’s Human Rights Ministry, said in an interview today that more than 3,000 prisoners in American custody were transferred to a detention facility at Camp Cropper, an American military base near Baghdad International Airport, on Aug. 15.
Mr. Sultan said the transfer was done “for security reasons, because Abu Ghraib is an unsafe area.” The prison has long been the target of frequent mortar fire from insurgent groups. The Justice Ministry, Mr. Sultan said, plans to use the prison as a temporary warehouse.
The prison’s closing was first reported today by McClatchy Newspapers.
Elsewhere in Iraq today, 11 people died in sectarian violence in and around Baquba, a restive city 30 miles northeast of Baghdad where Sunni and Shiite Arabs have engaged in a longstanding cycle of retributive attacks.
A roadside bomb in Khalis, a town north of the city, killed six people and injured 15 others, a Baquba police spokesman said. Two truck drivers and three other people were also killed by gunfire in the city’s western suburbs, he said.
A second attack in Khalid, the town north of Baquba, killed at least 10 more people there and injured another 10, the provincial governor, Raad Rashid, said.
In a market in Basra, a bomb attached to a motorcycle killed four people and injured 15 others.
Near the northern oil city of Kirkuk, on the border of the autonomous Kurdish region, four traffic policemen were killed in an roadside ambush as they traveled toward south toward Tikrit, Capt. Firas Mahmoud of the Kirkuk police said.
Also in Kirkuk today, a suicide bomber driving a truck full of explosives stormed into a building housing the offices of the main Kurdish political party, killing two security people and injuring 16 others, Maj. Kamil Shakhwan of the Kirkuk police said.
Late this evening in Kirkuk, a suicide bomb attack killed nine people, the Kirkuk police said.
An American soldier was killed this afternoon by small-arms fire in Baghdad, the military said. It also said another American soldier was killed Saturday by a roadside bomb that detonated near his vehicle in southeast section of Baghdad. It did not identify the soldiers or their units." |
