Five killed, 31 wounded in Baghdad, police sources say

08/24/2005

CNN News
Wednesday, August 24, 2005; Posted: 10:12 a.m. EDT (14:12 GMT)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN)—Insurgents struck Iraqi police checkpoints in western Baghdad on Wednesday, sparking fierce firefights in the capital, police said. Five people were killed and 31 wounded, police sources said.

The insurgents attacked about 3:30 p.m. local time (7:30 a.m. EDT) with various weapons, including rocket-propelled grenade launchers and AK-47s, police said.

Police say a car bomb also exploded.

Of the five dead, three were civilians and two were police. Seven police were among the wounded, the sources said.

Authorities closed off the area—a Sunni neighborhood called Jamiaa—and police were trying to get more personnel to the scene.

The area borders Amriya and other neighborhoods that have been insurgent strongholds.

Earlier, Iraq’s deputy minister of justice, Awshoo Ibrahim, escaped an assassination attempt in a western Baghdad neighborhood, police said.

Gunmen opened fire on his convoy along a major highway in the Adil neighborhood around 10 a.m. (2 a.m. EDT).

Four of Ibrahim’s bodyguards were killed in the attack and five others were wounded. Two vehicles were also destroyed.

On Tuesday, a suicide bombing killed seven people, including two Americans in Baquba.

A U.S. soldier from Task Force Liberty, a U.S. civilian contractor and five Iraqis—four center employees and a police officer—died in the strike on the Diyala Provincial Joint Coordination Center.

Among the wounded were nine Task Force Liberty soldiers, one U.S. civilian contractor, six Iraqi civilians and four Iraqi police officers.

The death brought the total of U.S. military killed in the war to 1,871 and the number of Americans killed in August to 73.

Other developments

A U.N. agency Wednesday said the marshlands in southern Iraq—nearly ruined under the Saddam Hussein regime—have been making a “phenomenal” recovery, with the wetlands bouncing back to nearly 40 percent of the area they covered in the 1970s. The region—which had been regarded as “a key natural habitat for people, wildlife and fisheries”—had been “damaged significantly since the 1970s, due to upstream dam construction and drainage operations” by the former regime, according to the U.N. Environmental Program.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed concerns that the disputes over Iraq’s constitution could lead to a civil war between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. “People have been moving together, talking, discussing things,” Rumsfeld said.