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6 Killed, 25 Injured In Iraq Attacks

September 24, 2006 / 8:03 AM EDT / CBS/AP

Scattered violence including a mortar attack on the Health Ministry and a car bomb targeting a police patrol killed at least six people and injured at least 25 in Iraq Sunday.

Two mortar shells slammed into the ministry building and its garden at 8:40 a.m., seriously injuring three civilians, police Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said. The attackers were not identified.

In eastern Baghdad, a car bomb targeting a police patrol killed two people and wounded 13.

The bomb was detonated in a parked car as the patrol went by at 10:15 a.m. One policeman was among the dead and five officers were injured, police Lt. Bilal Ali said.

An Iraqi soldier died in a morning attack in east Baghdad, where he was gunned down in his car on his way to report to his unit, police said.

Two Iraqi more soldiers were killed and another two injured when a suicide car bomber slammed into a checkpoint in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad. The soldiers opened fire on the car as it sped toward the checkpoint but were unable to prevent its detonation, police said.

One more person was killed and five others wounded in the town of Al-Musayyab, south of Baghdad, when their house was hit by a mortar shell, police said.

Police found more apparent victims of sectarian death squads in the capital, discovering five bodies bearing signs of torture, blindfolded with their hands and legs bound, in eastern Baghdad, police said.

Another bomb blast wounded two civilians in Mosul, some 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, police said.

Police in Baghdad raised the toll in the deadly bombing of a kerosene truck on a crowded street Saturday to 38 killed and 42 injured.

A Sunni extremist group, Jamaat Jund al-Sahaba — or Soldiers of the Prophet's Companions — claimed responsibility for the attack against Shiites in Sadr City, a sprawling slum that is home to more than two million people and a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

The group said it carried out the bombing to retaliate for a Friday attack by a death squad against Sunni Arab homes and mosques that killed four people in a mixed Baghdad neighborhood.

These attacks are part of the cycle of rising sectarian violence that has forced American and Iraqi troops to mount a massive security crackdown in the Iraqi capital, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports.

But even that has so far failed to slow the killing, and the top U.S. General in charge of Baghdad says he still doesn't have the extra Iraqi troops he needs to get the job done, Logan reports.

Also Saturday, a senior officer was attacked in Tikrit after dinner breaking his Ramadan fast.

Police Col. Ismaiel Chehayyan was at a friend's house in the city center when unknown assailants stormed the building, killing the officer and wounding the host, police said.

In other developments:

U.S. military authorities are reporting the deaths of three American soldiers in Iraq Saturday. They say one died in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. Two other troops were killed after a bomb exploded near their patrol in a town 150 miles north of Baghdad. The U.S. command says three other soldiers were injured. No further details have been released.

A classified assessment of global terror by U.S. intelligence agencies found that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has contributed to the birth of a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that terror is on the rise since the attacks of 9/11, the New York Times reported on its Web site Saturday.

An al Qaeda-linked group posted a Web video Saturday purporting to show the bodies of two American soldiers being dragged behind a truck, then set on fire in apparent retaliation for the rape-slaying of a young Iraqi woman by U.S. troops from the same unit.

In one success against al Qaeda in Iraq, Iraqi officials announced the arrest of a senior leader in the linked Ansar al-Sunnah group. Muntasir Hamoud Ileiwi al-Jubouri and two of his aides were captured near Muqdadiyah, 56 miles northeast of Baghdad late Friday, Brig. Qassim al-Mussawi, spokesman for the General Command of the Armed Forces, told The Associated Press. The Sunni militant group has claimed responsibility for numerous suicide attacks, the August 2004 execution of 12 Nepalese hostages and a December 2004 explosion at a U.S. military mess hall in Mosul that killed 22 people.

In northern Beiji, about 155 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen threw the decapitated heads of 10 Iraqi army soldiers into a popular open-air market, police said.

In Kut on Saturday, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, eight apparent death squad victims were turned in to the morgue. They had been dumped into the Tigris river.

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