Attacks Kill 20 in Iraq as U.S. Warns Against Divisions

02/20/2006

By ROBERT F. WORTH and JOHN O’NEIL
NY Times
Published: February 20, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 20 — At least 20 people were killed in insurgent attacks today, including a Marine, as Iraq’s political factions remained at odds, and the American ambassador renewed warnings against the formation of a government based on militias and sectarian movements.

Talks on forming a unity government had stalled over the weekend as deep divisions between different factions had become apparent.

Also today, the governor of the province of Karbala in the Shiite south announced that he was suspending all dealings with American troops and barring them from government buildings for “behaving irresponsibly.”

Two suicide bombs accounted for most of the deaths today. At about 7:20 a.m., a man blew himself up in a restaurant near a police station in the northern city of Mosul, killing six people and injuring at least six, according to officials from the Iraqi Interior Ministry. At midday, another bomber set off an explosion on a bus in Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 15, the officials said.

The Marine was killed when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb near the southern city of Karbala, the American military said in a statement.

Gunmen killed an employee of a hospital in Baquba in the country’s south, and a car bomb near a construction site in Baghdad injured more than 20 workers, Iraqi officials said.

The violence brought the two-day death toll from insurgent attacks to at least 37.

The sectarian violence, including a stream of abductions and killings in the capital, has heightened tensions between ethnic groups and magnified the challenges facing Iraq’s major political factions, which are struggling to agree on the principles of a unity government.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, underscored the stakes of the current talks at a press conference today at which he repeated his earlier warnings that a government dominated by sectarian interests would risk losing the support of the United States.

“The ministers of interior, defense, national intelligence, the national security adviser, have to be people who are nonsectarian, broadly acceptable, not tied to militias, that will work for all Iraqis,” he said.

“The United States is investing billions of dollars into these forces, military and police forces of Iraq,” he said. “We are not going to invest the resources of the American people into forces run by people who are sectarian.”

And he warned that a government split between rival sects could degenerate into the “warlordism” that has plagued Aghanistan for decades.

But disagreements over the relative power of different sects are exactly what has slowed the talks. The Kurds and the secular alliance led by Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister, are pushing for the creation of a supervisory council with executive powers. But the Shiite alliance, which has 130 of the Parliament’s 275 seats, has resisted, saying there is no basis for such a council in the Constitution.

Some Shiite leaders want to exclude Mr. Allawi from the government, a demand the Kurds say they will not accept. There has also been friction over the issue of Kirkuk, where Kurdish leaders want to expedite the return of Kurds expelled by Saddam Hussein. That has angered some Sunni Arab leaders and the followers of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who have a substantial bloc in the Shiite alliance. Mr. Sadr is also critical of Kurdistan’s quasi-independent status.

On Saturday, in a rare interview on Al Jazeera, Mr. Sadr said, “The wealth of Kirkuk belongs to all Iraqis,” and added pointedly, “No one has the right to demand a region.”

Under the Constitution, Parliament must meet for the first time by Saturday, 15 days after the final results of the December elections were certified. At that meeting, the representatives must choose a speaker and deputy speakers.

But political leaders say the choice of a speaker is tied to decisions on all the other major posts, including president and the prime minister’s cabinet. Meeting the deadline is unlikely at this point, with various factions bogged down in disagreements over policy and the distribution of crucial posts.

“We don’t want to violate the Constitution before our first meeting,” said Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish representative.

The governor in Karbala, Dr. Akeel al-Khazali, cut off dealings with American forces after they had failed to “respect the security elements in the province,” and had brought police dogs into government buildings, a aide to the governor said today.

“We are going to escalate things against them” the aide said.

Last week, the city council in Basra cut off contacts with the British military after the broadcast of a video that showed soldiers beating Iraqi teenagers there.

The bombing in the Mosul restaurant today followed a pattern in which insurgents often attack locations at which police officers or recruits gather.

One of the injured, Muhammad Tharwat, said that more than 25 people had been crowded into the restaurant before the attack, including three police recruits at one table. Mr. Thurwar said he was with two of his cousins when the bomb went off.

“I could not hear anything and there was heavy smoke in the restaurant but I noticed a light from the main door and then I got out,” he said. “When I got out I thanked God that I had not got hurt, but I remembered my cousins.”

When he shouted for them, only one responded. The two of them searched and found the other cousin just as he was losing consciousness, and drove him to the hospital, Mr. Tharwat said.

The bus bombing took place at 12:30 p.m. in the Kadimiya section of central Baghdad, Iraqi officials said.

The bomb just as the vehicle left a bus stop. Rescue workers said the dead had been so badly burned that they could not immediately say how many were men and how many were women.

On Sunday, in northern Baghdad, the owner of an ice cream shop was shot dead outside his store, an Interior Ministry official said. A policeman, an Iraqi Army soldier and a paramilitary officer were killed by gunmen in three shootings, the official said.

Also in Baghdad, a car bomb killed two people and wounded five near a Shiite political office in the Jadiriya district, The Associated Press reported. One of the dead and three of the wounded were police officers.

North of the capital in Taji, gunmen killed four truck drivers after ambushing a convoy carrying construction materials to an American military base, Interior Ministry officials said. South of Baghdad in the town of Salman Pak, two men who had been kidnapped days earlier were found dead, the police said. Not far away in Mahmudiya, a car bomb detonated on a police patrol, wounding two policemen.

Two bombs also exploded in the western city of Falluja, wounding three policemen and two civilians, witnesses and police officials said.

In Kirkuk, the deputy police chief and two bodyguards were killed by a roadside bomb, the police said. The officer, Brig. Hatem Khalaf Matrood al-Obaidi, was the highest-ranking Sunni Arab in the police department in Kirkuk, where tensions between Kurds and Sunni Arabs are high.

In Baquba, north of Baghdad, a police official said four people, all Shiites, were gunned down in a public market, in what appeared to be the latest of a series of sectarian killings.

Also on Sunday, American officials confirmed the crash in northern Iraq of a private plane carrying five German businessmen and an Iraqi. The businessmen worked for a Bavarian company, and their plane had been en route from Azerbaijan to Sulaimaniya when it crashed in the mountains of eastern Kurdistan on Thursday. There were no indications of what caused the crash.

The violence occurred as about 2,000 students demonstrated in Baquba against the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. No one was injured, police officials said.