By Bushra Juhi
The Canadian Press, BAGHDAD – A roadside bomb ripped through a bus Monday and killed 10 people working for an organization opposed to the Iranian regime, police said. Another 12 were injured in the blast north of Baghdad.
The blast occurred just after daybreak near Khalis, 80 kilometres north of Baghdad in Diyala province, an area notorious for such attacks, provincial police said. All the dead were workers at the Ashraf base of the Mujahedeen Khalk, or MEK, which opposes Iran’s regime.
The blast pushed in the side of the white public bus and peppered its blackened side with shrapnel holes. The bus, later inspected by U.S. soldiers, was streaked in blood, Associated Press TV footage showed.
"We were transporting the workers from Baqouba to the Mujahedeen Khalk when the roadside bomb exploded and killed all these people," one man who was on the bus told AP TV.
In other attacks, a roadside bomb killed two police officers and wounded three others in downtown Baghdad’s Karradah district, while one man was killed and six were injured when a bomb hidden in a minivan used as a bus exploded.
Gunmen killed two more police officers when they attacked a convoy in western Baghdad. Another group seriously wounded police colonel in nearby Ghazaliyah. Two other police officers, identified as former Baathists, were killed in Amarah, 290 kilometres southeast of Baghdad.
A car bomb targeting an American convoy killed one civilian and injured nine in Baghdad’s Tahariyat Square, police Lt.-Col. Abbas Mohammed Salman said. It was not known if there were any other casualties.
A roadside bomb hit a British convoy in southern Iraq, wounding three British soldiers, a spokeswoman said Monday.
The explosion occurred late Sunday in the Gizayza area of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, 550 kilometres southeast of Baghdad. Three soldiers were wounded, one seriously, British spokeswoman Capt. Kelly Goodall said.
Also late Sunday, a tribal chief who challenged Iraq’s most feared terrorist and sent fighters to help U.S. troops battle al-Qaida in western Iraq died in a hail of bullets – the latest victim of an apparent insurgent campaign against Sunni Arabs who work with Americans.
The prime minister, meanwhile, was frustrated again in trying to fill key security posts, and his spokesman hinted at a deadline if the impasse continued. Nouri al-Maliki is trying to get Shiite and Sunni politicians to agree on candidates who are independent and not tied to sectarian militias.
Shootings and bombings killed nine people and wounded 35 across the country Sunday, and the bodies of at least 10 more people were found in Baghdad, possible victims of the sectarian bloodshed tearing at Iraq.
The most significant killing involved Sheik Osama al-Jadaan, who was ambushed by gunmen as he was being driven in Baghdad’s Mansour district, a predominantly Sunni Arab area. Al-Jadaan’s driver and one of his bodyguards also were killed, police said.
Al-Jadaan was a leader of the Karabila tribe, which has thousands of members in Anbar province, an insurgent hotbed stretching from west of Baghdad to the Syrian border. He had announced an agreement with the U.S.-backed Iraqi government to help security forces track down al-Qaida members and foreign fighters.
