World

Truck Bomb In Baghdad

December 17, 2003 / 10:55 AM EST / CBS/AP

An explosives-laden truck speeding toward a police station collided with a bus at an intersection before dawn Wednesday, killing at least 10 Iraqis amid a surge of violence since the weekend arrest of Saddam Hussein.

Twenty people also were injured in the attack in al-Bayaa, a poor district in southwest Baghdad, hospital officials said. Ahmed Kadhim Ibrahim, deputy interior minister, said the dead were Iraqis, and that the truck driver had planned to strike the police station.

Suicide bombers have frequently targeted Iraqi police stations in strikes at what they view as collaborators with the U.S.-led occupation authorities.

The coalition scored a major victory over the weekend with Saddam's capture, but violence has continued in Iraq's volatile "Sunni Triangle" region as his loyalists seethe over the detention.

The explosion followed riots earlier this week in Baghdad by Saddam loyalists, who also ambushed a U.S. patrol in Samarra, stormed the office of a U.S.-backed mayor in Fallujah and battled American troops in Ramadi.

Ibrahim blamed the bomb Wednesday on Saddam's supporters.

"They were trying to avenge the cowardly leader, whom they saw as a hero in the past," Ibrahim said.

In other developments:

A document found with Saddam when he was captured provides a detailed description of the Iraqi insurgence, The Washington Post reports, and has led to the arrest of three Iraqi generals. The material shows Saddam to have been an inspiration to the fighters rather than an operational commander.

In a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted after Saddam's arrest, 65 percent of Americans now say U.S. efforts to bring stability to Iraq are going well, up from 47 percent before his capture. However, few Americans believe the war is over and just one in four said they think there will be fewer attacks on U.S. troops.

The U.S. military is holding Saddam in the Baghdad area, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council said Wednesday.

President Bush, in an interview with ABC, said Saddam deserved the "ultimate penalty" but it would be up to the people of Iraq to decide whether he should be executed.

Former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz has started calling his youngest son — named Saddam — by the name Zuhair instead, according to letters obtained by a London-based Arabic newspaper.

The Pentagon has delayed meeting with companies hoping to win $18.6 billion in Iraq rebuilding contracts, The Wall Street Journal reports, amid internal differences over how to award the deals.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, said Tuesday in Baghdad that military planners were preparing for American troops to stay in Iraq for up to two more years.

Backed by armored vehicles and Apache helicopters, U.S. troops conducted door-to-door searches during a massive, pre-dawn raid Wednesday that was designed to stamp out guerrilla resistance in the restive town of Samarra. At least a dozen people were detained.

The 4th Infantry Division, based in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, launched Operation Ivy Blizzard before dawn following an earlier raid in the area in which U.S. soldiers snared a suspected rebel leader and 78 other people.

Insurgents in and around Samarra, a predominantly Sunni town of 200,000 north of Baghdad, have repeatedly ambushed U.S. troops, and anti-U.S. resentment persists after Saddam's capture on Saturday.

The spike in attacks since news of Saddam's arrest, and pro-Saddam protests in Baghdad's Sunni areas and other cities, appear to be an attempt to spoil the victory scored by the United States. In other violence Wednesday, at least four people were injured at a pro-Saddam demonstration in the northern city of Mosul.

Meanwhile, Iraq's foreign minister appealed to the United Nations for help in establishing a democratic government and urged that it return its staff quickly to his country.

But Hoshyar Zebari, who criticized the United Nations for not helping topple Saddam, received no promise Tuesday that the world body's staff would go back soon.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan pulled all U.N. international staff out of Iraq in October after a series of attacks on humanitarian organizations.

Zebari urged the United Nations to put aside differences over the war in Iraq and not let his country down again after failing to endorse the military effort to topple Saddam's "murderous tyranny."

Iraq needs the world body now because it is "the key forum for collective international action to help us achieve our goals of restructuring and democratizing our country," he said.

"Settling scores with the United States should not be at the cost of helping to bring stability to the Iraqi people. This squabbling over political differences takes a back seat to their daily struggle for security, jobs, basic freedoms and all the rights the U.N. is chartered to uphold," Zebari said.

Annan presented the Security Council with a report — issued last week — in which he said Iraq remained too dangerous to reopen the Baghdad U.N. office. Instead, he said, the world body would open an Iraq office in Nicosia, Cyprus, and an annex in Amman, Jordan, with staff traveling to Iraq as needed.

Elsewhere, Mr. Bush's envoy to Iraq met Wednesday with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi — a staunch U.S. ally on Iraqi policy — seeking Italian assurances to help relieve Baghdad's huge debt burden. Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III was upbeat after winning agreement from Germany and France.

Iraq owes $40 billion to the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and others in the Paris Club. Other countries and private creditors are owed at least $80 billion in addition.