Baghdad, Iraq – Insurgents launched attacks Monday in the capital and parts of northern Iraq, including a suicide car bombing in the northern city of Irbil that killed at least 16 traffic officers and wounded more than 100 other people.
Dozens of traffic officers were lined up for morning training in an exercise yard in Irbil, 200 miles north of Baghdad, when “the bomber drove his car in and blew himself up among them,” Mayor Nawzad Hadi said.
One wounded policeman, Faryard Khorsheed, 22, said: “I couldn’t run away. I saw dozens of dead bodies and pieces of flesh – all belonging to my colleagues – and the whole area was full of the smell of blood and burned flesh.”
A bomb detonated on a road near the town of Tazah Khurmatu, 115 miles north of Baghdad, as an Iraqi army convoy passed by, killing three soldiers and wounding two, police Col. Abbas Mohammed said.
In the heaviest of Monday’s clashes in Baghdad, gunmen fired on a U.S. military patrol at 5:30 a.m. near a police station in the southwestern corner of the city, then detonated a car bomb when Iraqi police and soldiers responded, according to the U.S. military and the Iraqi Defense Ministry. The attackers then trained mortars and machine guns on the police station in a sustained barrage that ended with the arrival of more U.S. ground forces and air support.
The U.S. military reported no American casualties in the clash but said four policemen and one Iraqi soldier were killed. The Defense Ministry said, however, that there were no Iraqi casualties. The conflicting reports could not immediately be reconciled.
U.S. and Iraqi forces in far western Iraq, meanwhile, conducted a fourth day of search-and-destroy operations aimed at insurgent activity on the Syrian border and at preventing foreign fighters from being smuggled into Iraq.
A Marine spokesman said in a statement that searches uncovered three car-bomb factories in western Karabilah. Seventeen car bombs were found, including a tractor- trailer, a dump truck and a van rigged with explosives, which were destroyed on the spot by a Marine tank.
Over four days, 33 buildings were damaged or destroyed during combat operations, according to the statement, which added that only buildings occupied by insurgents or foreign fighters were fired on.
In interviews, Karabilah residents said U.S. planes conducted airstrikes on three neighborhoods where guerrillas loyal to the group al-Qaeda in Iraq were operating. More than a dozen houses, four mosques, two schools, a medical center and dozens of shops were destroyed, witnesses said.
“I hope this will be the end for those Arab terrorists whose main aim is to destroy the country,” said Hamed Saeed, 40, a government employee.
The military also reported that a U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb near the northern town of Tall Afar.
