World

Bus Ambushed In Baghdad; 11 Dead

May 11, 2006 / 11:15 AM EDT / CBS/AP

Gunmen opened fire on a bus carrying Iraqi civilians to work on Wednesday, then planted a bomb aboard the vehicle that exploded when rescue workers arrived, an official said. In all, 11 Iraqis were killed and six wounded.

Elsewhere, seven Iraqis were killed in other attacks, including four off-duty policemen in Ramadi, officials said Wednesday.

President Jalal Talabani said Wednesday that nearly 1,100 people were killed in Baghdad alone last month and urged Iraq's feuding factions to unite against surging crime and terrorism in the country.

Casualty figures from a suicide truck bomb attack in the northern city of Tal Afar on Tuesday night also rose to 22 dead and 134 wounded, officials said. The U.S. military flew some of the wounded to other cities when the local hospital was overwhelmed.

Talabani, a Kurd, said in a statement that the 1,091 bodies found in the Baghdad area in April were the tip of the iceberg.

"We feel shock, dismay and anger over the daily reports of the discovery of unidentified corpses and those of others killed" around the capital, he said.

"If we add this to the number of corpses that are not discovered, or to similar crimes in other provinces, then the total number ... reflects that we are confronting a situation no less dangerous that the results of terrorist acts" such as car bombings and other attacks.

Scores of unidentified bodies turn up around the capital on a daily basis, many bound, tortured and shot execution style in what officials say in an unwavering tide of reprisal sectarian killings.

In other developments:

Five people escaped from a U.S. detention center in northern Iraq, and U.S. soldiers and Iraqi forces were searching for them, the U.S. command said Wednesday. The detainees escaped early Tuesday from the Fort Suse Theater internment facility near Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad, said U.S. Spc. Stacy Sanning, a spokesman for the U.S. command in Baghdad.

A suicide truck bomber hit a crowded public market in the northern city of Tal Afar late Tuesday, killing at least 17 people and wounding 35, police said. U.S. troops rushed to the scene to treat the injured, officials said. The attack occurred in the early evening in the center of Tal Afar, according to Col. Abdul-Karim Mohammed of the Nineveh provincial police, who gave the casualty figures.

The bodies of two Iraqis who had been shot and handcuffed were found in eastern Baghdad.

Gunmen in two cars killed two traffic policemen in western Baghdad.

In Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, two roadside bombs targeting two American convoys, missed their targets but killed one civilian and wounded three.

An ambush by insurgents killed four off-duty policemen in Ramadi on Tuesday, apparently as they were leaving work. Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, is located in Anbar province, where many Sunni-led insurgent groups are based.

A U.S. soldier was killed in a bombing in east Baghdad, the U.S. military said Tuesday. The soldier died Monday but the American statement gave no further details.

Iraq's prime minister-designate said Tuesday the main stumbling blocks to forming a new Cabinet have been overcome and he expects to present his team to parliament for approval by the end of the week. Nouri al-Maliki said representatives of the country's political parties agreed on what factions would hold the "main posts" but were still discussing the distribution of "a few" of them, including the ministries of oil, trade and transportation, he said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the killing of an Iraqi reporter and a media worker whose bodies were discovered south of Baghdad on Monday. Laith al-Dulaimi, a reporter for Al-Nahrain, and Muazaz Ahmed Barood, a telephone operator for the station, were kidnapped and shot by men disguised as police officers at Diyala Bridge while driving home.

Sunni Arabs, who form the minority in the country but were once the power brokers under Saddam Hussein, say they are being targeted by so-called Shiite death squads operating either from within the Shiite-led Interior Ministry, or with the ministry's tacit approval.

Shiites say thousands of their community have had to flee their homes to escape threats by Sunni extremists.

Leadership of the Interior Ministry — a key to securing the country against the steadily escalating wave of violence — has been one of the key stumbling blocks in the formation of the new national unity government.

Al-Maliki has said the interior and defense portfolios will be filled by independents unaffiliated with individual parties or militias.

But many lawmakers say that the next interior minister will likely be a Shiite, and several have floated the name of the current minister, Bayan Jabr, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Saying that behind every unidentified corpse is "an orphan, a starving father or a grieving wife," Talabani warned that these daily abductions and murders are stoking a "climate of suspicion among the sons of the nation."

He said terrorists are capitalizing on the weakness of government institutions and stressed that the formation of the new government will help lead to a climate in which such attacks can be halted. But Talabani also called on all factions "to issue a fatwa (religious edict) condemning these crimes, irrespective of who perpetrated them."

Wednesday's worst attack occurred about 9 a.m. near Baqouba.

It began when suspected insurgents stopped a bus taking employees to work at the state-run Diyala Electronics Co., which makes products such as televisions. After ordering women off the bus, the insurgents shot and killed the men inside, said Adnan Hamad, a company spokesman. When the gunmen left, another company bus stopped and rushed to rescue the wounded. When the door of the bus was opened, a bomb the insurgents had planted there exploded, he said.

The final death toll was 11 killed and six wounded, said Hamad.

In Baghdad, suspected insurgents riding in two BMWs assassinated a Defense Ministry press office employee as he drove to work at about 8:15 a.m., police said.

One of the BMWs stopped to block the private car of Mohammed Musab Talal al-Amari, a Shiite employee in the Defense Ministry's press office, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. Three men then got out of the other BMW and opened fire in the residential neighborhood of Bayaa, killing al-Amari and wounding an Iraqi pedestrian, Hussein said.

The Defense Ministry controls Iraq's military.

In two other shootings in Baghdad, suspected insurgents killed a Shiite taxi driver and a Shiite who once belonged to Iraq's disbanded Baath party, police said. A similar attack killed a civilian driver about 80 miles south of the capital, said police.

The suicide attack in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad, occurred at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday as shoppers were scurrying to finish their purchases before closing, police said. Lt. Col. Ali Rasheed of the Interior Ministry said the main target of the bombing may have been a police station within the market area.

"We were manning a checkpoint when a truck full of flour sacks passed us and ignored our orders to stop, so I shot at the truck and seconds later it exploded, throwing me to the ground," policeman Arakan Youssif said in an interview Wednesday.

The director of the city hospital, Saleh Qado, said 22 people were killed and 70 wounded, but the U.S. command said that 134 Iraqis were injured, at least 24 of them critically. As casualties mounted at the local hospital, many of the wounded were driven to nearby coalition medical facilities or flown to ones in the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, the military said.