http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1419007,00.html
The outlook from the US military is almost as bleak. Brigadier-General Jeffery Hammond, deputy commander of US forces in Baghdad, said that extremists would step up their strikes in the run-up to elections on January 30. The Iraqi interim parliament said that the terrorists wanted to provoke a civil war and it urged Iraqis to maintain their "national unity". Yet the Government's message is little more than a call to Iraqis to grit their teeth and weather the violence as best they can. # US forces have captured a man described as a senior commander of a militant group linked to al-Qaeda, the Iraqi Government said. The 33-year-old Iraqi was a leader of the hitherto unknown Abu Talha group, affiliated to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom Osama bin Laden endorsed this week as his lieutenant in Iraq. In Mosul yesterday car bombs were used to attack a US patrol and a combat outpost. Fifty insurgents then raided the outpost. US soldiers killed at least 25 people; 15 Americans were injured. In Baghdad two Lebanese businessmen were kidnapped by armed men who broke into a house in an upmarket suburb yesterday.Iraqi police face new terror threat as 30 die in booby-trapped house >From James Hider in Baghdad FIRST there was the car bomb, the scourge of the police; now the escalating insurgency in Iraq has thrown a new terror against struggling security forces: the house bomb. As police stormed an insurgent "safe house" in western Baghdad on Tuesday night, the building exploded on their heads, killing six officers and wiping out entire families asleep in neighbouring homes. In all, 30 people are thought to have died in the blast, with more than 20 wounded. Three adjacent houses were destroyed. US soldiers and Iraqi police scrambled all night through the debris, pulling one civilian alive from the ruins. Police were investigating whether they had been lured into a trap after officers said that the patrolmen had been tricked by an anonymous tip-off that led them to their deaths in Ghazaliya, a predominantly Sunni district where guerrillas are known to operate. "It seems to have been a trap," one police officer said. "The house was turned into a bomb." Colonel Adnan Abdelrahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said that the police had moved in to the area after local people complained that a gunman was firing on people from the roof at about 10pm on Tuesday. He said that all the patrolmen who responded to the call were killed. The US Army said that the blast was caused by almost two tons of explosives, leading them to believe that the house may have been an insurgents' bomb-making factory. Iraqi police said that they suspected that foreign fighters may have been involved in setting the booby-trap and were examining whether the blast had been detonated by a suicide bomber or remote control. When US Marines invaded the rebel-held city of Fallujah last month, their greatest concern was that guerrillas could have rigged buildings to explode as their troops went in. That did not happen, but the sudden rise in attacks in the past week, with scores killed, has raised concerns that the Fallujah offensive failed to break the insurgency. The Ghazaliya blast ended a day on which 32 Iraqi police officers and National Guardsmen died in co-ordinated attacks across central Iraq. Saad Jabr, a senior Iraqi lawmaker, said that the carnage would continue until the American military allowed the Iraqi forces free rein to buy heavy weapons. "I guess the Americans are afraid they'll turn the weapons on them," Mr Jabr, who heads the interim national assembly's finance committee, said. He accused the US military of doing a "wishy-washy" job of smashing the insurgency, which has cost thousands of Iraqi lives as well as those of almost 1,000 US troops. "They are not doing a very tough or complete job. They did Fallujah, but they didn't finish it," he said. "In Mosul, they hardly did anything (when guerrillas rose up there last month)." A suicide bomber, apparently in Iraqi military uniform, blew himself up in a US army mess hall in Mosul last week, killing 22 people. "It's about time the Americans take a decision: either they do the job properly or they let Iraqis do it themselves," Mr Jabr said. He admitted, however, that the security forces, under-equipped and under attack, were getting "more and more scared". ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. 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