Car bombs kill 12 in twin attacks

By The Associated Press and The Washington Post

MOHAMMED URAIBI / AP An Iraqi schoolgirl cries after a car-bomb explosion near an office of the Iraqi Ministry of Education yesterday in Baghdad, Iraq.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — Car bombs killed at least a dozen people in Baghdad and another major city yesterday as pressure mounted on interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to avert a full-scale U.S. attack on the insurgent stronghold Fallujah.

At least eight people, including a woman, died when an explosives-laden car slammed into concrete blast walls and protective barriers surrounding the Education Ministry and exploded in Baghdad's Sunni Muslim district of Azamiyah.

Ten others were injured, including a 2-year-old girl, according to Al-Numan Hospital. Officials at Baghdad Medical City Hospital reported two more deaths and 19 injured. Dr. Raed Mubarak said he was unsure whether some of the wounded were transferred from other hospitals.

Until yesterday, the Ministry of Education remained untouched by the car bombs that erupt daily here. Insurgents had said the place was off-limits because of the benevolent mission of the ministry, and they may have been deterred by the buildings clustered around it: a high school, a primary school and a kindergarten.

When a BMW sedan detonated outside the ministry at 9:30 a.m., those running fastest to the crater in the middle of the street were parents.

"I saw three cars were burning and I saw all the glass of the windows was broken and I saw the schoolmaster of the primary school telling the pupils to go home," said Mustafa Khateeb, 34, who was summoned from his university workplace by his sister, whose son was in the primary school.

"The children were crying and screaming," Khateeb said.

Meena Abdul Qader, 13, was in a classroom at the Hariri High School for Girls when the windows blew in and smoke filled the building.

"I saw five students in the classroom next door injured by the glass, but I don't know what happened to them because I ran away to my house," she said.

Khateeb, who teaches dentistry at a Baghdad college, said the attack had been foreshadowed by warnings to the ministry's guards and leaflets warning residents.
 
"I expected what happened today," he said. "I always warn my wife not to put the children near the windows."

In Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near a military convoy carrying an Iraqi general, killing four civilians and wounding at least seven soldiers.

Iraqi police said the attack was an assassination attempt on Maj. Gen. Rashid Feleih, commander of a special task force, who was not injured. He was on his way to a news conference to talk about the role of the task force, according to police and media reports.

The violence came as American forces prepare for a major offensive against Fallujah and other Sunni militant strongholds north and west of Baghdad in hopes of curbing the insurgency so that national elections can be held in January.

With Marines poised for the onslaught on the rebellious Sunni Muslim cities, insurgents seemed bent on showing their power.

Roadside blasts and car bombs killed three other members of the security forces and wounded up to 20 in the Sunni towns of Samarra, Abu Ghraib and Haditha.

A Marine assault on Fallujah in April failed to dislodge insurgents and touched off a kidnapping spree that has seen scores of foreigners abducted in Iraq. More than 35 have been killed.

U.S. forces have pounded insurgent positions around Fallujah almost daily, but American officials say the go-ahead for an all-out assault must come from Allawi, the interim prime minister.

Pressure mounted yesterday on Allawi, a Shiite, to forgo an assault and to continue negotiating with the hard-line Sunni clerics who run the city, which has become a symbol of Iraqi resistance throughout the Arab world.

Mohammed Bashar al-Faidhi, spokesman of the Association of Muslim Scholars, said his clerical group would use "mosques, the media and professional associations" to proclaim a civil-disobedience campaign and a boycott of the January elections.

"In the case of an incursion in Fallujah, there will be a call to boycott elections," al-Faidhi said. "In case of an incursion, more deterrent steps will be taken."

He said that a boycott call by the influential clerical group "will have a great resonance among the people of Iraq."

Such a call by Iraqi Sunnis would probably draw little support among the Shiite majority, believed to comprise about 60 percent of Iraq's nearly 26 million people. The country's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has been demanding elections for more than a year, and some Shiite preachers have been telling followers that failing to vote would be sinful.

However, a boycott call could have resonance among central Iraq's Sunnis, who form the core of the insurgency, and inflame passions among the country's major religious communities. Interim President Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni, has also spoken out against an attack.

"It's not reasonable to call for elections that are supposed to be democratic and yet a peaceful city gets attacked by weapons, missiles, planes and bombs," said Nabil Mohammed, a professor at Baghdad University. He said an all-out attack would "elicit a very big response and support from Iraqis."

U.S. officials believe Fallujah is the stronghold of an al-Qaida faction led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose followers are responsible for numerous car bombings and beheadings of foreign captives.