http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=qw1158008763310B26 2
Suicide bomber kills Iraq recruits By Ibon Villelabeitia in Baghdad September 12, 2006 05:01am Article from: Reuters A SUICIDE bomber killed 12 people in a minibus transporting Iraqi army recruits today, as al-Qaeda said in a video on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks that US forces in Iraq were "doomed" to fail. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will make his first official visit to neighbouring, Shiite Iran tomorrow, a day later than originally planned, an aide said. Most of the dead in the blast were young recruits who had boarded a public minibus outside the Muthanna base in central Baghdad, which has been targeted in the past by insurgents from the Sunni Arab minority, including al-Qaeda Islamists, who oppose the US-backed Shiite-led coalition government. Recruiting centres are key to Washington's plan to withdraw troops suffering daily losses. At least 2669 US troops have died since the 2003 invasion, which Washington said was partly a response to purported ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the war, which Washington also said it waged to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were never found. As Americans marked the anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington, Ayman al-Zawahri, deputy al-Qaeda leader, said in remarks apparently addressed to Western leaders: "I tell them do not bother yourselves with defending your forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. These forces are doomed to failure." Thousands of kilometres away from New York's Ground Zero, where hijackers crashed two airliners into the World Trade Centre twin towers, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad told a ceremony in Baghdad there was "no alternative to a successful Iraq". A recent Pentagon report warned that civil war is a possibility in Iraq. Repeating Washington's view that a "stable and non-sectarian democracy" in Iraq was part of a US strategy to stamp out extremism from the Middle East, Khalilzad said: "Any other outcome will embolden al-Qaeda and extremists and produce new tragedies and the repetition of old ones like 9/11." The Washington Post disclosed a US Marines report that officials said concluded US forces had effectively lost the vast desert province of Anbar, leaving a vacuum for al-Qaeda. With an eye on the eventual withdrawal of the 155,000 mostly US foreign troops from Iraq, the US military last week handed over formal command of Iraq's army to Mr Maliki, who is struggling to avert a slide into all-out civil war. Shoes and tattered clothes lay amid the mangled wreckage of the bus, where the suicide bomber detonated his explosive belt after boarding near the base. A roadside bomb targeting US soldiers killed three civilians in western Baghdad. Iraq and Iran, both predominantly Shiite, fought a bloody war in the 1980s when Saddam, a Sunni, was in power. But relations are warmer since the empowerment of Iraq's long-oppressed Shiites, unsettling once dominant Sunnis. Washington and other Arab states, dominated by Sunni rulers, are suspicious of non-Arab Iran's influence in Iraq, where the Islamic Republic has an "unparallelled ability to affect stability and security across most of the country", a report by the London-based Chatham House think-tank said last month. Facing genocide charges for the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, Saddam returned today to a Baghdad courtroom, where a US-based Iraqi doctor demanded compensation from foreign companies she said supplied the toppled leader with chemicals he is accused of using to gas Kurdish rebels. Saddam used his presence in court after a three-week hiatus to intervene again in current politics, accusing his accusers of seeking to divide Kurds and Arabs and break up Iraq. Five years after the September 11 attacks and more than three since the invasion, violence kills 100 people every day. Demands by Shiite leaders to form a Shiite "super-region" in the south with similar autonomy to that enjoyed by Kurds in northern Kurdistan region have raised fears of a partition in Iraq that could draw in regional powers. A divisive draft law on federalism, bitterly opposed by Sunnis who fear it would cut them off from Iraq's oilfields in the north and south, was delayed in parliament yesterday. Parliament faces an October 22 deadline to pass a law that defines how Iraq's 18 provinces can form autonomous regions. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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