Iraq War, Three Years On
Three years ago, in the early hours of March 20th, the U.S. invasion of Iraq began – a first-strike war which the Bush administration argued was necessary because of the threat it said was posed by weapons of mass destruction allegedly possessed by Iraq.
This morning, long after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's government, the sounds in Iraq were much like any other day in the past few years of the war: a roadside bomb exploded in central Baghdad near a prison Monday, killing at least two Iraqi police commandos and a civilian.
The bombing, just a few hundred yards from an Interior Ministry prison, seriously damaged a vehicle carrying the troops. Police say at least four other commandos were injured in the attack.
Sunday, American troops clashed with gunmen north and west of Baghdad and insurgents lobbed a mortar round into the holy city of Karbala where a million Shiite pilgrims assembled for a major religious commemoration.
Iraqis in the capital expressed unease with the increasing violence, which they said they hoped would have ended by now.
"It is a painful anniversary. We were expecting that Iraq would get better," Munthir Rasheed said. "But it is completely in reverse. Iraq has passed through three years which are the worst in its history."
Police said eight civilians, including a child, were killed in clashes between U.S. troops and gunmen in Duluiyah, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The town is in the Sunni Arab heartland where the Iraqi army and U.S. soldiers opened an airborne campaign last week to hunt for insurgents.
During operations in Duluiyah, U.S. troops arrested Col. Farouq Khalil, an Iraqi interior ministry official, after raiding his house, police said.
The U.S. military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Earlier it said dozens of suspected insurgents had been detained. The Iraqi government said that 17 suspects were released after questioning and that the "search for terrorists and weapons" continued in that region.
Members of the Iraqi Red Crescent said U.S. troops, citing security concerns, prevented them from delivering relief aid to beleaguered communities in the area.
Elsewhere, two civilians were killed and 10 wounded when gunmen attacked U.S. troops stationed at the governor's office in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad. Firefighters were seen pulling furniture from a burning house set ablaze in the crossfire.
In the capital, police found the bullet-riddled bodies of three men bound hand and foot and dumped in a sewage treatment plant in the southeast neighborhood of Rustamiyah. The victims appeared to be the latest in the wave of revenge killings set off by the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.
Assailants in southwest Baghdad also gunned down a man as he was leaving a Shiite mosque, police said.
Those deaths came a day after a dozen other suspected victims in the shadowy Shiite-Sunni reprisal spree were found in the capital.
In other recent developments:
Heads of Iraq's largest political blocs agreed Sunday to form an National Security Council to advise a new government once formed, negotiators said. The 19-member council, to be headed by President Jalal Talabani, was established as an interim measure by the politicians who have been struggling to agree on the make up of a new government. Iraq's new parliament was sworn in Thursday.
The U.S. military's goal is to have Iraqi security forces in control of 75 percent of the country's territory by this summer, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Baghdad said.
Sunday, a mortar round fired at the holy city of Karbala landed in a parking lot a half mile from a shrine that was the destination of Shiite Muslims mourning Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, in an annual pilgrimage. No one was hurt.
Pilgrims began self-flagellation rites with chains Sunday in displays of grief over Hussein's death. Monday was to be the 40th and final day of mourning.
The governor of Karbala said more than 3 million pilgrims had arrived in the city.
In violence aimed at police, gunmen killed four guards at archaeological sites in the northern city of Mosul. A fifth policeman and a bystander were wounded. A roadside bomb exploded on a police patrol in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing one officer and injuring 10 others, the Iraqi military said.
A Baghdad policeman driving on a rural road in Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of the Iraqi capital, was killed by gunmen, police said. Four men riding in the car were wounded in the attack.
Near the southern city of Basra, two officials of the Iraqi Islamic Party were gunned down by four assassins. In the northern region of Kirkuk, two Iraqi soldiers were found stabbed to death two days after they were reported kidnapped, U.S. authorities said.
In his weekly U.S. radio address Saturday, President Bush said the violence in Iraq "has created a new sense of urgency" among Iraqi leaders to form such a government.
Those leaders — representatives of the squabbling Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish blocs in Iraq's new parliament — have recessed negotiations to observe Monday's Shiite holiday and Tuesday's Kurdish new year.
They are deadlocked over how to apportion the most powerful jobs in the new government, with minority factions seeking to limit domination by Iraq's Shiite majority.
Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the largest Sunni bloc in parliament, said Iraqi and U.S. troops have failed to bring order and improved infrastructure to the people.
"The security situation has worsened," said Adnan al-Dulaimi, of the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue. "Iraq is the scene of killing, torture and arrests. The infrastructure has deteriorated more because those who run the country are unable to rehabilitate the country."