Baghdad, Iraq – An insurgent blew up his car in a Baghdad square Sunday, killing four people in the first significant suicide bombing in the capital in weeks.
More than 20 Iraqis died Sunday in a swell of violence, including a bomb that killed a police colonel and four children.
Still, as the toll among American service members in the Iraq war neared 2,000 dead, the U.S. military said it has hampered insurgents’ ability to unleash more devastating suicide bombings with a series of offensives in western towns that disrupted militant operations.
“We have interrupted the flow of the suicide missions into the large urban areas. Certainly, we have had success denying free movement of car bombs into Baghdad,” Brig. Gen. Donald Alston told reporters in the capital.
“It is also a function of Iraqi citizens who have come forward, and with their support, we have found car-bomb factories. We have found a series of large weapon caches,” he said.
In Sunday’s attack in Baghdad, the bomber plowed his explosives-laden car into two police vehicles in downtown Tahrir Square at 11:30 a.m., killing two police officers and two civilians.
U.S. troops rushing to the scene in Humvees found bystanders tending to 11 wounded.
In the past, Baghdad has been heavily battered by deadly suicide attacks, with a string of them killing nearly 700 people from April 1 to early September.
But amid the intensified security clampdown, suicide car bombings have been greatly reduced in recent weeks across the country, and those that have occurred have caused fewer casualties.
Roadside bombs hit three separate U.S. convoys in Baghdad on Sunday morning, wounding a total of five soldiers, a military spokesman, Sgt. 1st Class David Abrams, said.
The violence came after a week in which 23 U.S. soldiers were reported killed, raising to 1,996 the number of military personnel who have died since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Also Sunday, investigative judges took testimony from the first witness in the mass- murder trial of Saddam Hussein and seven members of his former Baathist regime over the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujayl.
The judges went to a military hospital to take the deposition from Wadah Ismail al-Sheik, a cancer patient who was director of the investigation department at Hussein’s feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujayl massacre.
Al-Sheik is too sick to appear in court, and officials did not want to wait until the trial resumes Nov. 28 to get his testimony.
