World

Bomb Death Toll Rises In Iraq

February 3, 2004 / 11:16 AM EST / CBS/AP

American military officials raised the death toll in suicide bombings at two Kurdish party offices to 67 on Monday, while a Kurdish official said he suspected the bombings were carried out by terrorists linked to al Qaeda.

No group claimed responsibility for Sunday's attacks, the bloodiest in Iraq in six months. But American and Kurdish officials suspected foreign militants or Ansar al-Islam, an al Qaeda-linked Islamic militant group operating in Kurdish areas of the north.

"All indications point to the involvement of Islamic terrorists with al Qaeda connections," Barham Salih, prime minister of the eastern sector of northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish enclave, said from Washington.

"This demonstrates that the terrorists are losing and this will only strengthen our resolve."

In other developments:

President Bush, declaring he wants "all the facts," said Monday he will order an independent investigation into intelligence failures in Iraq. The British government hinted it was prepared to hold a similar inquiry.

The White House budget chief says the administration will ask Congress in the coming months for up to $50 billion dollars more for the ongoing military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iraqi police caught two men placing a roadside bomb Monday near the capital's main Doura oil refinery, a U.S. commander said. The two men were believed to be an Iranian and an Afghan.

A rocket-propelled grenade was fired at an Army vehicle in Mosul as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz met with local officials across town. Officials say no one was hurt. Three months ago, on a visit to Baghdad, the hotel where Wolfowitz was staying came under rocket attack. He was not injured.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will meet in Washington on Tuesday with Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Bush administration is hoping Annan's delegation to Baghdad can find a formula to overcome Shiite grumbling over U.S. plans for a transition to civilian rule July 1.

U.S. troops are ready to hand over the security of Baghdad to emerging Iraqi forces, a U.S. commander said Monday, adding that his troops have made a "significant dent" in insurgent networks in the capital.

American soldiers will gradually move to the edge of the city as more Iraqi Civil Defense Forces and police graduate from U.S.-supervised training, said Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, which is in charge of Baghdad.

"It is a necessary and correct step," he said.

Dempsey's announcement comes two weeks after a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle at a gate of the U.S.-led coalition's headquarters, killing at least 31 people and injuring more than 120. Still, Dempsey said the number of insurgent attacks have gone down with the arrest of 118 people during the last three weeks.

"The insurgency in Baghdad is much less organized than it was a month ago and much more fearful that it was a month ago," he said.

On Sunday, a rocket attack on a U.S. supplies base in Balad north of the capital Baghdad killed one American soldier and wounded 12, including two seriously. Another soldier was killed Sunday and two others were hurt when their Humvee overturned near the town of Haditha.

The two deaths mean 524 U.S. service members have been killed since the Iraq conflict began in March.

The near-simultaneous attacks on the Kurdish organizations on Sunday killed many of the top leaders of the two parties, who were gathered to greet hundreds of ordinary Kurds on the first day of the four-day Eid-al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice, holiday.

The suicide attacks were carried out by two men dressed as Islamic clerics with explosives wired to their bodies, Kurdish television said.

One of them joined the Eid celebrations at the Kurdish Democratic Party, or KDP, which controls Irbil province, and the other sauntered into the office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, centered in neighboring Sulaimaniyah province, eight miles away.

Guards said they did not search people because of the tradition of receiving guests during the holiday.

At about 10:45 a.m., the two bombers, standing amid well-wishers waiting to shake hands with Kurdish leaders, detonated the explosives. Walls caved in and the ceiling collapsed in one office.

Officials said 267 people were injured in the attacks.

The U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council declared a three-day period of national mourning beginning Monday during which flags will fly at half-staff and Koranic verses will be recited.

The KDP leadership took the heavier blow because it is based in Irbil, 200 miles north of Baghdad. The dead included the Irbil region's governor Akram Mintik, the deputy governor, KDP Deputy Prime Minister Sami Abdul Rahman, his two sons and ministers in the Kurdish administration.

The PUK's military commander also was killed.

Militias of both parties fought alongside U.S. soldiers during last year's invasion of Iraq, but also have been rivals for power in the Kurdish self-rule region since 1994.

The Kurds rose up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 after Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War but were suppressed by Baghdad. International intervention provided Kurds a self-rule region under U.S.-British protection. The Kurds want to maintain that in a future federal Iraq.

Washington favors federalism, which would give Iraq's major groups — Shiite and Sunni Arabs, and Kurds — a degree of autonomy within a unified nation-state.

However, the Kurdish aspirations make Arabs and Turkomen, an ethnic group related to the Turks, uneasy. Kurdish unity in the aftermath of the suicide attacks is likely to increase that unease.

At stake is not only political power but also control over the country's oil wealth, much of it centered around the northern city of Kirkuk, which is claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen as their own.