AFP – Two car bombs exploded at a Baghdad police station Sunday, killing 14 people and wounding scores, as the US military moved to wall in the capital’s warring factions behind concrete barriers.
In a mid-morning attack, two car bombs struck outside the Al-Bayaa police station in the southwest of the city, the latest in a recent spate of deadly attacks aimed at undermining a joint US-Iraq security strategy.
Six of the 14 killed were policemen, security officials said, while another 90 people were wounded, including 40 policemen. The blast tore a massive crater in the road and devastated at least two civilian houses alongside.
Iraqi security forces are regular targets of insurgents and Sunday’s attack was the latest spectacular blast that insurgents have managed to carry out despite the massive security crackdown in the city.
More than 200 people have died in the past week in such bombings, including 140 on Wednesday in the deadliest strike since the March 2003 US-led invasion.
As bombers unleashed more carnage, the US military said it would try to control the sectarian bloodshed by separating more of Baghdad’s districts with high concrete walls into separate protected enclaves.
Officers said they would erect barricades between hot spots despite one such experiment — a five-kilometre (three-mile) wall around a dangerous Sunni enclave — coming under flak from angry local residents.
Brigadier General John Campbell, a senior military commander in Baghdad, said the walls were designed save civilian lives and that the intent was not to divide the city along sectarian lines.
Since April 10, US paratroopers have been deploying at night to erect a wall made of six-tonne (14,000-pound) concrete sections around Baghdad’s notorious Sunni district of Adhamiyah.
The wall is designed to prevent Shiite death squads from launching attacks to drive out the Sunnis from the district, and to prevent Sunni insurgents from using the pocket as a base for raids and bombing runs into Shiite areas.
But the structure has angered residents who accuse the military of hardening the city’s already bitter sectarian divisions.
On Saturday, several residents, including 54-year-old housewife Um Haider, told AFP that they feared the wall would isolate them from the city and harden ethnic divisions.
"Erecting concrete walls between neighbourhoods is not a solution to the collapse in security and the rampant violence. If so, Baghdadis would find themselves in a maze of high walls overnight," Haider said.
But Campbell defended the creation of what the US military has dubbed "gated communities" — like the wealthy private estates in the suburbs of American cities that are insulated from urban life by gates and wire fences.
He pointed out that Baghdad’s Green Zone was an example of such a security tactic — although the fortified district is often hit by rocket attacks and on April 12, a suicide bomber penetrated it and blew himself up in parliament.
Campbell said such barriers will be set up only in violent areas of Baghdad, but did not name the districts.
"We’ve selected communities that have seen an increase in violence, a heightened violence, and we’re protecting some of those communities with walls," he said.
Baghdad’s security crackdown aided by a "surge" of 21,000 extra US troops since February 14 has managed to curb sectarian bloodshed to some extent, but has up till now failed to stop bomb attacks.
Washington and the US military accuse some of Iraq’s neighbours such as Iran and Syria of helping armed groups in the country and fuelling violence that has killed tens of thousands of people in the last four years.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki left for Egypt and Kuwait on Sunday to hold preparatory talks for a meeting next month of Iraq’s neighbours and world powers to resolve his country’s turmoil.
On May 3, world leaders will gather in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for two days of talks on ways to end the bloodshed.
Sunni leaders from western Iraq condemned the killing of the chairman of Fallujah city council, Sheikh Sami Naib al-Jumaili, a critic of the Al-Qaeda militant group and the fourth holder of the post to be assassinated.
"This murder was a crime against all of the citizens of Iraq," said Anbar Governor Ma’amun Sami Rashid Al-Alwani and Provincial Council chairman Abdulsalam Abdullah in a joint statement.
According to Fallujah police, Sheikh Jumaili was gunned down Saturday in front of his home in the Golan district in the north of Fallujah.
