Three separate blasts in Iraq killed 15 people Wednesday, as the three year anniversary of Saddam Hussein's capture by U.S. forces passed barely noticed amid the raging sectarian violence.
In the first and most deadly blast, a car bomb exploded near a crowded bus stop in eastern Baghdad during morning rush hour, killing 11 people and wounding 27 in a mostly Shiite area, police said.
The blast in Kamaliyah neighborhood also occurred about 50 yards from the Shiite al-Rasoul mosque but did not damage the small building, said police Capt. Mohammed Abdul-Ghani and police Maj. Mahir Hamad.
"A Volkswagen car exploded right near the bus stop, hitting a group of people, including women and children who were waiting to take a bus to a fruit and vegetable market," said one witness, Abu Haider al-Kaabi.
The poor area of Baghdad appeared to be the latest target of widespread sectarian violence in the capital involving Sunni Arabs and Shiites. On Nov. 23, suspected Sunni insurgents carried out the deadliest single attack of the Iraq war by using bombs and mortars to kill 215 people in the capital's Shiite slum of Sadr City.
In other attacks in Iraq, men armed with guns and explosives destroyed a small Shiite shrine in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, early Wednesday, causing no injuries, and gunmen killed a nine-member Shiite family in an attack on their house in Hasna village south of the capital, police said.
Iraqi troops also opened fire on two suicide car bombers who drove up to the headquarters of the Iraqi army's 2nd Battalion near the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, but the attackers set off their explosions, killing four soldiers and wounding 10, said Iraqi Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin. The base protects the area's oil pipelines.
For several months, U.S. and Iraqi officials have been discussing proposals to transfer responsibility of security in cities such as Baghdad from American forces to newly trained Iraqi police and soldiers.
On Oct. 28, U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki outlined three goals: speeding up the training of Iraq's security forces; moving ahead with Iraqi control of its forces; and making the Iraqi government responsible for the country's security.
On Dec. 5, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the country's top American military spokesman, told reporters in Baghdad that the U.S. military expects all of Iraq to be under the control of Iraqi forces by mid-2007. He said this is part of an accelerated timetable discussed by Bush and al-Maliki during their summit in Jordan late last month.
The U.S. maintains about 140,000 troops in Iraq and is now considering changing its strategic course in the country, which the U.S.-led coalition invaded in March 2003.
In other developments:
It was three years ago Wednesday that American forces acting on a tip found Iraq's deposed dictator hiding in a small underground dugout in a back yard. "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him," U.S. administrator Paul Bremer told journalists in Baghdad, to loud cheers, the following day. Saddam is presently on trial for war crimes and genocide stemming from a military crackdown on Iraq's Kurdish population. He has already been sentenced to death by a separate tribunal.Saudi Arabia has warned it could decide to provide financial support to Iraqi Sunnis if the U.S. pulls its troops out of Iraq, where sectarian violence between the minority Sunnis and majority Iraqi Shiites has threatened to tear apart the country, The New York Times reported. Saudi Arabia is a majority Sunni country and up to now has promised U.S. officials that it would not intervene to assist Iraq's Sunni insurgency, according to the report, appearing in Wednesday's edition of The Times and citing anonymous American and Arab diplomatic sources.The New York Times also reported Wednesday that Iraq's government has presented the United States with a plan that calls for Iraqi troops to assume primary responsibility for security in the city of Baghdad by March. The official quoted, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser, was not available for comment Wednesday morning, but U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said American and Iraqi officials have been weighing proposals about the transfer of power over security in Iraq for several months. The White House says President Bush has largely decided on a new approach to the Iraq war, that he will announce next month, but he gave no public hint of his plan Tuesday when he met with the country's Sunni vice president. America's outgoing No. 2 commander in Iraq has said that curbing unemployment and improving services would help reduce the violence in the country, warning that military muscle cannot win the war alone. At times during his farewell news conference Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli — in charge of day-to-day combat operations throughout Iraq — sounded exacerbated, almost despairing, over what he said were misperceptions that American forces were fighting a conventional war or that they can achieve victory without improvements on other fronts. On Tuesday, a suicide bomber struck a crowd of mostly poor Shiites in Baghdad, killing at least 63 people and wounding more than 200 after luring construction workers onto a pickup truck by offering them jobs as they were eating breakfast. The blast, condemned by both Shiite and Sunni lawmakers, came on a day that saw the U.S. military report the deaths of five more troops. At least 59 other Iraqis were also killed or found dead, including an AP Television News cameraman who was shot while covering clashes in the northern city of Mosul.