BAGHDAD – A suicide bomber drove his truck into a police station north of Baghdad on Monday, crumbling the squat concrete building and damaging a nearby school in the deadliest in a series of blasts that killed at least 24 people across Iraq.
Nobody claimed responsibility for the attacks in the capital and two northern areas. But they bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has promised an offensive to coincide with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
The blast in Dijlah, a village in the Sunni heartland 60 miles north of the capital, tore through a nearby empty school and several stores. At least 13 people – three officers and 10 civilians – were killed and 22 were wounded, police said.
A suicide car bomber also struck a police checkpoint in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, 80 miles north of Baghdad, killing three officers and one civilian and wounding 10 other people.
In the capital, a bomb in a parked car exploded at a market near Baghdad University’s technology department, killing five civilians and wounding 15.
A car bombing near the Polish Embassy killed two Iraqis and wounded five, police said.
The attack was launched five days after the Polish ambassador, Gen. Edward Pietrzyk, was wounded in an ambush.
Polish Charge d’Affaires Waldemar Figaj told The Associated Press that he heard a series of explosions around the embassy Monday morning but the closest appeared to be about 200 yards away and the embassy had no reason to believe it “was targeted in any way.”
All police spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
The U.S. military announced that two more servicemen were killed in fighting – a Marine west of Baghdad on Monday and a soldier near the northern city of Beiji on Friday. At least 3,817 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Iran, meanwhile, reopened five border crossing points with Kurdish-run northern Iraq on Monday. The border points had been closed Sept. 24 to protest the U.S. detention of an Iranian official.
The U.S. military has said the official was a member of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, which is accused of providing arms and training to Shiite extremists. But Iraqi and Iranian authorities have claimed that the detained Iranian, Mahmoud Farhadi, was in Iraq on official business and demanded his release.
The border points were reopened after a Kurdish delegation traveled to Iran to complain the region should not be punished for something the Americans did.
Meanwhile, Iraqi authorities claimed that a former prime minister and a hard-line Sunni sheik – both opponents of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki – were implicated in clashes earlier this year between U.S. and Iraqi troops and a heavily armed cult of messianic Shiites near the holy city of Najaf.
One of the men detained in the fighting said in a videotaped confession that former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, and Harith al-Dhari, head of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, had contributed financially to the Soldiers of Heaven group.
A lawmaker from Allawi’s parliamentary bloc, Izzat al-Shabandar, called the accusations “baseless” and said they were politically motivated.
