Mosul, Iraq – Four suicide bomb attacks struck Iraqi police and army forces in a 16-hour wave of insurgent violence sweeping the northern city of Mosul on Saturday and Sunday, killing 38 people and wounding scores more.
One U.S. military officer described the violence as the latest sign that insurgents here are increasingly coordinating attacks on the growing Iraqi security forces.
At least 10 more people were killed in other violence across Iraq, including six police commandos gunned down in western Baghdad and a high-ranking police official assassinated in southern Baghdad, according to an Iraqi Interior Ministry official. One U.S. soldier was killed in Baghdad on Sunday by a homemade bomb, the military said. And in Kirkuk, insurgents wired an explosive belt onto a dog and detonated the device when the dog wandered into an Iraqi police patrol, wounding one policeman.
The Mosul attacks came as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld echoed remarks by his advisers in recent months suggesting that the insurgency could last as long as a dozen years and that Iraq would become more violent before elections later this year.
The rate of insurgent attacks remains steady, but the typical attack has grown more lethal, Rumsfeld said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Bush administration officials have been at odds with military leaders over the strength and resiliency of the insurgency. Gen. John Abizaid said last week that the insurgency was undiminished, seemingly countering a remark days before by Vice President Dick Cheney, who asserted it was in its “last throes.”
With polls showing support for the war dropping, President Bush is expected to use a prime-time speech Tuesday at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C., to press his case for a large continued military presence in Iraq and explain why the administration’s strategy will eventually work.
A British newspaper reported Sunday that U.S. officials recently met secretly with Iraqi insurgent commanders north of Baghdad to try to negotiate an end to the bloodshed.
Speaking generally, Rumsfeld said such meetings “go on all the time” and that Iraqis “will decide what their relationships with various elements of insurgents will be. We facilitate those from time to time.”
Three militant groups – al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army and the Islamic Army in Iraq – issued statements on their websites denying they had negotiated with U.S. or Iraqi officials to end the insurgency.
Abizaid said U.S. and Iraqi officials “are looking for the right people in the Sunni community to talk to … and clearly we know that the vast majority of the insurgents are from the Sunni Arab community. It makes sense to talk to them.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.