IRAQ: Americans among casualties in Iraq bombing

By McClatchy-Tribune News Service

BAGHDAD -  Bombers killed nearly 40 people Thursday in Iraq, half of them at a meeting of tribal sheiks in Anbar province, where the United States and tribal forces had been thought largely to have defeated Sunni Muslim insurgents.

Details of the Anbar bombing were sketchy, but U.S. officials confirmed that American service members were among the casualties.

The attack came just days before the United States was to turn Anbar security over to the Iraqis. That plan is now on hold, American officials said.

The bombing was carried out by a man wearing a suicide vest who struck at a meeting between tribal sheiks and American officials in a municipal building in Karmah, early reports said. Iraqi officials said the toll was at least 20 dead and at least 30 wounded. Most of the victims were Sunni tribal leaders who were allied with the U.S. military in the fight against the militant group al Qaida in Iraq.

In a separate attack, insurgents targeted the governor of Nineveh province as he left the government headquarters in Mosul, a mostly Sunni city north of Baghdad in which Sunni extremists are said to have concentrated after being pushed from Baghdad and Anbar province.

Police said a roadside bomb exploded on the governor’s route as the convoy passed. Five minutes later, attackers detonated a car bomb in a second attempt further down the governor’s route. That bomb resulted in dozens of casualties, most of them civilians shopping in a nearby open-air market, police said.

Police said at least 18 Iraqis were killed and 62 injured in Mosul. The governor escaped unharmed, though his bodyguards were among the wounded, according to Iraqi authorities.

The bombings came in a bloody week with several attacks on local government offices and security targets that have killed at least 10 American service members, four U.S. government civilian employees and scores of Iraqis. Still, Iraqi officials said that the spurt of violence wasn’t a long-term setback to the security gains of recent months.

“The general atmosphere is that they are out: the militias and al-Qaida and the affiliated gangs,” said Abdul Kareem Khalaf, a spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry. “Can I say they are completely finished? No, that would be unrealistic. But now they are no more than outlaw gangs in the throes of death. Formerly, whole institutions would fall within minutes as a result of their activities, but now they need to really plan and go to great lengths to find a weak link in our security.”