Car bomb kills dozens

By Seattle Times news services

MOHAMMED IBRAHIM / AP Adlah Ghaib Alyas cries as her sister, Najlah Ghaib Alyas, is admitted to a hospital in Mosul, Iraq, last week. Their father, Ghaib Alyas, background, said his wife died in an airstrike in Tal Afar.

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The blast tore through a crowded Baghdad market close to a police station on Haifa Street, a main thoroughfare that has been the scene of fierce clashes, as dozens of people were applying to join the force, police said.

The U.S. military and the Iraqi Interior Ministry said the blast was an attack on the police station.

But some witnesses and police at the scene gave a different account, saying two mortar rounds had landed in the area, not a bomb.

Health Ministry spokesman Saad Al-Amili said at least 27 people were killed and dozens of others wounded. Some witnesses at the scene and a hospital morgue said at least 35 people were killed.

A huge crater was punched into the road and at least nine cars were destroyed in the attack.

Iraqi police forces have regularly been targeted by insurgents who see them as "collaborators" with U.S. forces. Militants are bent on thwarting U.S.-backed efforts to build a strong Iraqi police force ahead of January elections.

Indeed, insurgents' attacks in Fallujah and other Iraqi cities not controlled by U.S. forces have caused the military to turn increasingly to air power.

U.S. officials think targeting insurgents from the air is an effective tactic, but analysts say the high civilian casualties that often result could create a backlash among Iraqis.

Until now, U.S. forces in Iraq have fought mainly on the ground against a resilient enemy, but now air power is being used because it is the most effective tool in places like Fallujah, where U.S. ground troops are not present.

Air Force F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, as well as Navy F/A-18s flying off the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy in the Persian Gulf, have been used in the recent attacks, Pentagon officials said. Air Force AC-130 gunships, with side-firing 105-mm artillery guns, also have seen action.
 
Yesterday, U.S. planes attacked a suspected militant hideout in Fallujah, the center of operations and support for a group led by Jordanian-born terror suspect Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

U.S. officials said that attack "effectively and accurately" targeted al-Zarqawi operatives and associates in a building where they were meeting, and that civilians were spared.

However, a Fallujah General Hospital official said three houses had been destroyed and at least 20 people were killed, including women and children.

In the northern city of Tal Afar, which also had fallen under the control of insurgents, a U.S. airstrike Thursday apparently killed dozens of Iraqi civilians.

A leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, criticized the use of heavy U.S. force in Tal Afar, saying the Americans caused "catastrophes" that could have been avoided.

Yesterday, Turkey urged the United States to quickly end military operations in Tal Afar, saying attacks have caused casualties among the mostly ethnic Turks living there.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute think tank, said U.S. officials seem to think airstrikes in Fallujah will wear down the insurgents and buy time for U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces to prepare for a ground assault.

"But you have to wonder whether we're radicalizing the Iraqi civilian population" in the meantime amid claims — substantiated or not — that airstrikes are killing innocent people, Thompson said.

It was Iraqi reaction to the deaths of hundreds of civilians that caused the U.S. Marines to end a three-day ground attack on Fallujah in April.

The United States also could face public outcry over a helicopter attack in downtown Baghdad on Sunday that destroyed an abandoned Bradley fighting vehicle that was being swarmed by dozens of Iraqis, many of them youngsters.

"The number of dead we are receiving these days is unbelievable. We can hardly keep up," said Abdul Razaq al-Obadi, deputy director of Baghdad's morgue.

According to Iraq Health Ministry statistics, nearly 3,200 Iraqis have been killed since April. Al-Obadi said almost all of the bodies he handles are of male civilians, women and children caught in the crossfire between U.S. forces and insurgents.

"We have counted 3,186 civilians killed since April, including 139 children and 167 women, but statistics don't tell the entire story," said a senior Health Ministry official in charge of keeping records, who asked not to be named.

Reliable numbers are hard to come by in Iraq, but according to the Iraq Body Count, an Anglo-American group of academics and peace activists, at least 11,797 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in March 2003.

The U.S. military does not keep a record of Iraqis killed.