Violence continues in Iraq

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By The Los Angeles Times | Friday, January 26, 2007 11:22 AM CST | () comments

Smoke rises over the Karrada neighborhood in central Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday Jan 25, 2007 after a car bomb blast. An initial report said that six people were killed and 14 wounded in the explosion. (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic)

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq’s Shiite prime minister exchanged heated words with a Sunni Arab lawmaker Thursday over the country’s new security plan, leading parliament temporarily to suspend a raucous debate and Iraqi television to abort its coverage.

The argument underscored the deep divides that have bedeviled attempts to quell Iraq’s civil war.

As the legislators debated, the violence here continued with more than 80 Iraqis and at least one U.S. soldier reported killed in a string of bombings, mortar fire and other bloodshed.

In the day’s worst attack, a suicide car bomber caused a massive explosion at a busy Baghdad intersection where shoppers waited to buy bread outside a bakery, killing at least 27 people and injuring 54 others, police and witnesses said.

“These terrorists are always one step ahead of the government security forces,” said Ridha Mustapha, a mini-bus driver who rushed to the scene after hearing the blast from his apartment. “It should be the other way around. All the government does is talk about the security plan, when the fact of the matter is that they should be taking the initiative in order to deter these attacks before they even occur.”

At least two rockets slammed into the Green Zone, setting off sirens and warnings to take cover in the heavily protected neighborhood that houses the U.S. and British embassies and the government’s headquarters. The blasts caused six injuries, most of them minor, the U.S. military said in a statement.

The parliamentary clash took place as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki presented his arguments in favor of the U.S.-backed security plan he called a Strategy to Impose the Law. The plan would leave no safe havens for militants, regardless of religious or political affiliations, he told lawmakers.

“Some say that this plan targets Sunnis or Shiites. The fact is that this plan targets all who stand in the way of the law,” al-Maliki said.

Abdul Nasir Janabi, a Sunni cleric and legislator from a region south of Baghdad notorious as the Triangle of Death, responded by protesting a major sweep by U.S. and Iraqi troops Wednesday through Haifa Street, a Sunni neighborhood near the Green Zone that is dominated by anti-government militants. Sporadic blasts continued Thursday in the area where more than 30 gunmen have been killed, according to Iraqi officials.

Janabi accused al-Maliki’s administration of purging Sunni Arabs from the government, arresting pilgrims returning from Saudi Arabia and imposing politically motivated death sentences, a possible reference to Saddam Hussein’s execution last month.

“We cannot trust this premiership,” Janabi said, as the shouting escalated around him.

Al-Maliki retorted: “All I could tell our brother the sheik is that he will trust in this premiership once we present his file and hold him accountable for it.” As Shiite legislators loudly applauded, he said, “one hundred and fifty kidnapped individuals in his area — why doesn’t he talk about that?”

Mahmoud Mashhadani, parliament’s speaker and a Sunni, interrupted the exchange, chiding al-Maliki for making “unacceptable” accusations and adding with heavy sarcasm that “the security plan will be very successful because you people are divided from this moment.”

He then called for an adjournment to avoid enflaming sectarian tensions. The session resumed soon after, but Iraqiya, the state-run television station, stopped airing it. The station later put out an edited version of events.

In his speech, al-Maliki said the government would hunt down militants wherever they are, in churches, homes and mosques. “Don’t think for one moment that the Baghdad security plan will be limited to this city alone,” he told legislators. “We will pursue the criminals outside of Baghdad, on the outskirts and even further, wherever they decide to flee.”

He promised to go after any political or community group that shelter outlaws, adding that anyone using government vehicles for unauthorized purposes would be arrested and punished.

The government concedes that Shiite militiamen linked to parliament’s two largest political blocs have infiltrated the security forces and government vehicles have been used in a number of high-profile kidnappings and killings.

The first of a promised 21,500 U.S. troops have arrived in Iraq to help implement the security plan in Baghdad and Al Anbar province, center of the Sunni-driven insurgency. Al-Maliki also has pledged to move troops to the capital but has not said when the operation will kick off.

Police recovered at least 40 bullet-riddled bodies Thursday, apparent victims of the nightly killings by sectarian death squads. Four more bodies were pulled from the Tigris river south of the capital, near Suwayrah, a Baghdad morgue official said. Two had been beheaded and the others shot multiple times.

The early evening explosion in Baghdad’s upscale, mostly Shiite Karada neighborhood torched dozens of shops and apartments, littering the streets with body parts and debris.

“I don’t know the fate of many of my friends and relatives. ... There are numerous charred bodies,” said Maan Abid, who saw the blast from his plumbing store. “The only thing that saved me was the wall that I was standing next to, right outside my shop. Otherwise, the shop is destroyed, all the windows shattered.”

Witnesses said the suicide bomber tried to park his sports utility vehicle at the intersection but blew himself up when traffic police ordered him to move on. At least two policemen were among the 27 killed.

Minutes later, mortar rounds exploded in northeast Baghdad, near the Shiite district of Sadr City, killing at least one person and injuring four members of a family, police said.

Earlier Thursday, a bomb planted on a motorcycle exploded near one of Baghdad’s busiest wholesale markets, a frequent target of attacks. At least four people were killed and 18 injured in that blast, police said. Another bomb exploded on a commercial street in Baiya, a religiously mixed neighborhood in south Baghdad, killing at least three people and injuring 10 others, police said.

An Iraqi soldier was killed and three others injured in clashes with gunmen in Baghdad’s western Mansour neighborhood.

A U.S. soldier was killed when a roadside bomb exploded near a patrol northwest of Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement. At least 3,065 U.S. personnel have been killed since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, according to icasualties.org.

Times staff writer Said Rifai and special correspondents in Baghdad contributed to this report.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — An Iraqi judge postponed a session in which Saddam Hussein’s former deputy Taha Yassin Ramadan had been expected to be sentenced to death on Thursday after the lawyers for the plaintiffs failed to show up.

The court had been expected to raise the sentence after an appeals court ruled that Ramadan’s previous sentence of life in prison was too lenient.

Judge Ali al-Kahishi said the session will be adjourned until Feb. 12, “because the plaintiff lawyers are not present in the court because they were not notified.”

Ramadan was accused in the Dujail case, which focused on the government’s killing of 148 Shiites in a town north of Baghdad in 1982 following an assassination attempt there against Saddam.

On Nov. 5, Ramadan was convicted of murder, forced deportation and torture and sentenced to life in prison sentenced to life in prison. A month later, the appeals court said the sentence was too lenient, and returned his case to the High Tribunal, demanding he be sentenced to death. The court agreed to turn it to a death sentence.

The same day Ramadan was convicted, the court sentenced Saddam, his half brother and former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court, to death. Three other defendants were sentenced to 15 years in jail while one was acquitted.

Saddam was hanged on Dec. 30, while Ibrahim and al-Bandar were executed Jan. 15, provoking anger among their fellow Sunnis, who are the main driving force of the insurgency that began after the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam in 2003.