| Iraq-Jordan |
| Triple suicide attack thwarted |
| 2005-07-14 |
| Iraqi police thwarted a triple suicide attack on Baghdad's Green Zone government compound on Thursday, shooting dead two bombers and wounding and capturing a third, a U.S. military spokesman said. Police said the attack, claimed by al Qaeda's Iraq wing, involved a car bomber followed up by two bombers on foot. The target was a checkpoint guarded by Iraqi troops and police and used by civilians arriving for work at the fortified complex. Doctors at the city's Yarmouk hospital said they had seen two bodies from the attack and five people were wounded -- among them, it appeared, the third bomber who failed in his mission and whose capture could yield important intelligence. Brigadier General Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said only two bombers were killed. It was a rare success for the security forces against a campaign of daily attacks that has killed perhaps 1,500 people in three months. The attack "failed in every way because of discipline and courage under fire of the Iraqi security forces," Alston said. U.S. commanders are keen for new Iraqi forces to take over the burden of fighting the insurgency to let Americans go home. Police guarding the checkpoint spotted what they identified as a suicide bomber driving toward them during the morning rush hour, Alston said. They opened fire, and the bomb went off before reaching the checkpoint. Two other bombers, strapped with explosives, then ran toward them but were gunned down. One survived and, after an Iraqi explosives expert defused his bomb, was taken into custody. He was being treated in hospital in the custody of Iraqi police but U.S. officers expected to interview him at some point, Alston told reporters. It is rare for forces in Iraq to capture people they know are involved in suicide bombing and they will be anxious to gather what intelligence they can -- though it is equally likely the bomber knows little of the men who sent him on his mission. Most suicide bombers are believed to be young men, many of them foreign, whose religious allegiance to the likes of al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has been allied to the insurgency among Iraq's Sunni Arab minority which appears to be directed in part by loyalists from Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime. They are fighting U.S. occupation and the new, Shi'ite-led government installed after U.S. troops toppled Saddam in 2003. Alston said he did not know the captured man's nationality. The attack came on a new July 14 public holiday, announced last month and marking the 1958 revolution that overthrew the British-installed monarchy and gave Iraq its first taste of real independence from foreign domination. The new holiday could anger Saddam's followers: the leader of the 1958 coup, Abdelkarim Kassem, later survived an assassination attempt by a young Saddam. Saddam's Baath party had instead marked the July 17 anniversary of the 1968 putsch which brought it to power, and forces are on heightened alert during the period of the newly restored holiday and the one canceled after Saddam's fall. Near the northern oil capital of Kirkuk, where ethnic tensions between Arabs and Kurds are running high, gunmen killed three policemen and wounded two when they shot at their car in the town of Rashad. In Kirkuk itself an Iraqi soldier was killed and a female comrade wounded by gunmen in car. Thursday's attacks followed a major suicide car bombing in the capital a day earlier, when an insurgent blew up his vehicle in a crowd near U.S. troops in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 27 people and wounding about 70, most of them children. In a nation numbed to horrors, the attack on children was front-page news in Iraq. The Iraqi edition of pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat called it the "Mother of all Massacres." One U.S. soldier was among those killed, and three were among the injured, U.S. forces said. An Iraqi television crew traveling to the funerals of some of those who died were ambushed by gunmen on Thursday, their employers said. Three journalists were wounded. Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Farrell told Reuters his men had cordoned off an area of houses near a highway for security sweeps on Wednesday when the bomber drove up an alley. The bomber failed to pierce the military cordon and detonated his vehicle in a crowd of children and adults nearby. "The scene was almost indescribable," he said. "People nearest the blast, some were literally obliterated on the scene. Multiple lacerations and traumatic amputations. At least nine people I saw were killed instantly in a most horrific fashion." There had been no claim of responsibility on the day and on Thursday al Qaeda's Iraq wing disowned any connection with it. |
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| Iraq-Jordan |
| More on the Abu Talha capture |
| 2005-06-16 |
| A top aide to Al-Qaeda frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been captured in Iraq's northern city of Mosul, the US military revealed. Mohammed Khalaf Shakar, also known as Abu Talha, is "Zarqawi's most trusted operations agent in all of Iraq," a military statement said Thursday. "This is a major defeat for the Al-Qaeda's terrorist organisation in Iraq. Zarqawi's leader in Mosul is out of business," said US Air Force Brigadier General Donald Alston. According to the military statement, he surrendered to US and Iraqi forces on Tuesday without a fight in "a quiet neighbourhood in Mosul" after they were led to his whereabouts by "multiple intelligence sources." "According to former Talha associates, Talha never stayed more than one night at any one residence," the statement added. Alston, the new top military spokesman, told reporters in Baghdad: "Numerous reports indicated he wore a suicide vest 24 hours a day and stated he would never surrender. Instead Talha gave up without a fight." Iraqi authorities said recently they had captured one of Abu Talha's most trusted aides and his financial manager, Motleq Mahmud Motleq Abdullah, also known as Abu Raed, in Mosul on May 28. They had also announced the arrest of another Zarqawi aide in Mosul known as Mullah Mehdi. Abu Talha is accused of masterminding some of the deadliest attacks against US and Iraqi forces in Mosul. Iraq's third-largest city, it has been a major front for the insurgency since November. "Talha fell like so many others fall, and that is through a combination of factors that ultimately catch up to him," Alston said. "In his case like so many others along the way, civilians helped us get closer to him." The Iraqi government said in early March that 11 of Zarqawi's top aides were captured and seven killed and that Abu Talha was the most significant man in the network left standing. In a diagram of the network released at the time Abu Talha is shown mustachioed with a full head of hair and appears to be in his 30s. |
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