Suicide Bomber Kills 102 in Baghdad

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Suicide Bomber Kills 102 in Baghdad

By Kim Gamel

The Associated Press

Saturday 03 February 2007

Baghdad, Iraq - A suicide truck bomber struck a market in a

predominantly Shiite area of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least

102 people among the crowd buying food for evening meals, the most

devastating strike in the capital in more than two months.

The attacker was driving a truck carrying food when he detonated

his explosives, destroying stores and stalls that had been set up

in the busy outdoor Sadriyah market, police said.

The late-afternoon explosion was the latest in a series of attacks

against commercial targets in the capital as insurgents seek to

maximize the number of people killed ahead of a planned U.S.-Iraqi

security sweep.

Many of the injured were driven to the hospitals in pickup trucks

and lifted onto stretchers.

"It was a strong blow. A car exploded. I fell on the ground," said

one young man with a bandaged head, his face still streaked with

blood.

Officials said at least 102 people were killed and more than 200

wounded.

It was the deadliest attack in the capital since Nov. 23, when

suspected al-Qaida in Iraq fighters attacked the capital's Sadr

City Shiite slum with a series of car bombs and mortars that

struck in quick succession, killing at least 215 people.

A suicide bomber also crashed his car into the Bab al-Sharqi

market, near Sadriyah, on Jan. 22, killing 88 people. The surge in

violence comes as Sunni insurgents have stepped up attacks against

Shiite targets in an apparent bid to maximize the number of people

killed ahead of a planned U.S.-Iraqi security sweep.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, eight bombs exploded within two

hours, beginning with a suicide car bomber who targeted the

offices of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, leader

of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, police said. Two people were

killed in the first explosion, which devastated four nearby

houses.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the attacks in the oil-rich

region, but concerns have been raised that insurgents have fled

north to avoid the impending crackdown in Baghdad.

At the Kurdish party offices, guards opened fire as the attacker

drove up, and the explosives detonated about 15 yards from the

building, killing at least two people and wounding 30, including

five KDP guards, police Col. Dishtoun Mohammed said.

Concrete blast walls protected the offices from serious damage,

but the explosion devastated four nearby houses. Five charred cars

were near the entrance of the Kurdish building, in a mainly

Turkomen district.

"We are upset and angry about the existence of a party office in

our area," Um Khalid, a 52-year-old Turkomen housewife, said as

she examined her damaged home. "Had the office not been here, the

suicide bomber would not have chosen to explode his car near our

houses."

Another car bomb exploded about 20 minutes later near a girls'

school in the south of the city, but the school was closed for the

weekend and no casualties were reported, police Col. Anwar Hassan

said.

A third car bomb hit a gas station in southern Kirkuk, followed by

two other parked car bombs 20 minutes later near a popular pastry

shop. Eight people were wounded in those explosions.

"I heard the sound of the explosion as I was adding water to the

flour inside the shop. I rushed outside to see smoke and fire

rising from the car bombs while some moving cars were colliding

with each other," said Mohammed Faleh, who works in the Shaima

pastry shop.

A sixth car bomb wounded five other people in the mainly Arab

al-Wasiti area in southern Kirkuk, while two roadside bombs

targeted police patrols at about the same time in a predominantly

Christian area in the north of the city.

Razqar Ali, a Kurdish leader and head of Kirkuk provincial

council, accused the militants of trying to destabilize the city,

which Kurds hope to incorporate into their autonomous region to

the north - over the objections of the Arab and Turkomen

populations.

"They want to depict the city as unsafe to provide a pretext to

other groups to interfere," he said, an implicit reference to

Turkey's objections to the Kurdish efforts.

Turkey, Iraq's northern neighbor, is pressuring the Iraqi

government to protect the interests of the Turkomen, ethnic Turks

who once were a majority in the city. Ankara also fears Iraqi

Kurdish ambitions could fuel hostilities with Kurdish separatists

at home.

In Mosul, northwest of Kirkuk, armed insurgents and Iraqi forces

fought for several hours and authorities imposed a temporary

curfew on the city. There was no immediate word on casualties.

Police spokesman Brig. Abdul Karim al-Jubouri said Iraqi security

forces backed by U.S. air power were moving in.

Gunmen also attacked a police checkpoint at the northern entrance

to Samarra 60 miles north of Baghdad, killing four policemen and

wounding another, police said, adding that three militants were

killed and one was wounded in the fighting that lasted for about

30 minutes.

In Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, a convoy of 15 cars carrying

gunmen brandishing weapons and banners declaring the establishment

of an "Islamic State" drove through the Sunni town while

businessmen quickly closed their stores for fear of trouble.

The show of force followed the Iraqi government's announcement on

Tuesday that it had arrested a provincial leader of al-Qaida in

Iraq and broken a major cell in the area.

On Friday, a U.S. Army helicopter was shot down near Taji, a major

U.S. base about 12 miles north of Baghdad, police and witnesses

said - the fourth helicopter lost in Iraq in the last two weeks.

The U.S. command said two crew members were killed, and the

al-Qaida-linked Islamic State of Iraq claimed responsibility.

Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, meanwhile, called for Muslim unity

and called for an end to sectarian conflict - his first public

statement in months on the worsening security crisis.

He called on all Muslims to work to overcome sectarian differences

and calm the passions, which serve only "those who want to

dominate the Islamic country and control its resources to achieve

their aims."

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Associated Press writers Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad and Yahya

Barzanji in Kirkuk contributed to this story.

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Analysis is Bleak on Iraq's Future

By Mark Mazzetti

The New York Times

Saturday 03 February 2007

Washington - The release on Friday of portions of a bleak new

National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's future left the White

House and its opponents vying over whether its findings buttressed

their vastly different views about how to arrest the worsening

sectarian chaos there.

The assessment, by American intelligence agencies, expressed deep

doubts about the abilities of Iraqi politicians to hold together

an increasingly balkanized country, and about whether Iraqi troops

might be able to confront powerful militias over the next 18

months and assume more responsibility for security.

The analysis, the first such estimate on Iraq in more than two

years, described in sober language a rapidly unraveling country in

which security has worsened despite four years of efforts by the

administration. President Bush acknowledged last month that his

strategy had failed so far.

The estimate suggested that the United States now faced an

unpalatable decision, in which a rapid withdrawal of American

troops would only accelerate momentum toward Iraq's collapse, and

in which Iraq faced long odds of quelling the violence and

overcoming hardening sectarian divisions, regardless of how many

American troops police Iraq's streets.

The report was released a week after Vice President Dick Cheney

dismissed suggestions that Iraq is in a parlous state, saying,

"The reality on the ground is, we've made major progress."

The administration has also intensified its criticism of Iran,

accusing it of fueling the sectarian violence in Iraq and

providing Shiite militias with material for bombs that the

administration says have been used in attacks on American forces.

The White House has thus far made little evidence public to

support its case.

The intelligence report did conclude that Iran is providing

"lethal support" for Shiite groups that is intensifying the

violence. But it portrayed the violence as essentially

"self-sustaining," and suggested that the involvement of

outsiders, including Iran, was "not likely to be a major driver of

violence or the prospects for stability."

National Intelligence Estimates provide a consensus of the 16

agencies that make up the intelligence community.

In choosing to take the rare step of making public three and a

half pages of "key judgments" from the classified report,

administration officials seized on one conclusion - that American

forces remain "an essential stabilizing element in Iraq" - to

reinforce their view that more troops are needed to secure Baghdad

and give Iraqi leaders breathing room to develop a political

settlement, particularly between the warring Sunnis and Shiites.

But top Democratic lawmakers said the estimate's conclusions

supported their view that the best way to combat violence in

Baghdad would be through new political and diplomatic programs.

The declassified portions included an assessment that an Iraqi

military hampered by sectarian divisions would be "hard pressed"

over the next 12 to 18 months to "execute significantly increased

security responsibilities, and particularly to operate

independently against Shia militias with any success."

The report also concluded that security in Iraq would continue to

deteriorate at current rates unless "measurable progress" can be

made in efforts to reverse the conditions that fuel violence.

The full classified report was said by officials to be about 90

pages in length, and was provided to the White House and members

of Congress. Top Democrats said the release of the intelligence

estimate would strengthen their hand as the Senate prepares for a

possible vote next week on a nonbinding resolution opposing

President Bush's new Iraq strategy.

"The estimate reaffirms my belief that the best hope for progress

toward stabilizing Iraq lies only with the Iraqi people and their

political leaders," Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West

Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Intelligence

Committee, said in a statement. "The steps identified by the

intelligence community as having the best chance of reversing the

chaos and bloodshed in Iraq are all political developments, not

military."

But Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said at the

White House that the estimate "gives us some evidence" of why Mr.

Bush had concluded that "an American withdrawal or stepping back

now would be a prescription for fast failure and a chaos that

would envelop not only Iraq, but the region."

Mr. Hadley said the estimate also bolstered the White House

strategy of sending more than 20,000 new troops into Iraq.

The previous National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, in the summer

of 2004, detailed three possible outlooks for Iraq over the

following 18 months, with the most pessimistic possibility that

Iraq would descend into civil war.

By contrast the new report, struggling to describe the Hobbesian

nature of the ongoing violence in Iraq, said the situation had

become so complex that calling it a "civil war" was hardly

sufficient.

"The intelligence community judges that the term 'civil war' does

not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq,

which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni

insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally

motivated violence," the assessment read.

John E. McLaughlin, who oversaw the previous intelligence estimate

when he was acting director of central intelligence, said he

believed that intelligence officials in 2004 had presciently

assessed what was to come in Iraq, but that the escalation of

sectarian violence over the past year has made the situation even

more complex.

"Civil war is checkers," he said. "This is chess."

The report also warned that a further sectarian splintering of

Iraq could incite other countries in the Middle East to arm and

finance various sects in the country: Saudi Arabia, Jordan and

Egypt supporting the Sunnis, and Iran coming to the aid of Shiite

forces.

A national intelligence estimate on Iraq that was produced in 2002

in the prelude to the American invasion has became infamous as an

example of an intelligence failure, because most of its central

assertions about Iraq's weapons capabilities and ties to terrorism

have since been proven to have been mistaken. Since then, American

intelligence officials have made efforts to overhaul the process

to produce the reports, in part by giving new emphasis to

dissenting views that were once buried in obscure footnotes.

The latest analysis is understood to contain multiple dissents,

one of which concerns the role of Syria in supporting Sunni

insurgents in Iraq. Intelligence analysts have been divided over

whether it is the policy of the government in Damascus to aid the

flow of foreign fighters who enter Iraq from Syria, or whether

that assistance is the work of lower-level Syrian officials acting

on their own.

American intelligence analysts have also disagreed about the

extent to which Iranian government officials are aware of the flow

of Al Qaeda operatives between Iran and Iraq.

Beyond the current grim picture, the report described several

"triggering events" that could cause the situation to worsen

significantly. Among them, it listed the assassination of major

religious or political leaders, a complete Sunni defection from

the government, and sustained mass sectarian killings that could

"shift Iraq's trajectory from gradual decline to rapid

deterioration with grave humanitarian, political and security

consequences."

Were the already fragile government to collapse, the report

outlined three possible scenarios: the emergence of a Shiite

strongman to assert authority over minority sects, an "anarchic"

fragmentation that puts power in the hands of hundreds of local

potentates, or a period of sustained, bloody fighting leading to

partition of Iraq along ethnic lines.

"Collapse of this magnitude would generate fierce violence for at

least several years," the report concluded, "ranging well beyond

the time frame of this estimate, before settling into a partially

stable end-state."

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