37 Dead In Attacks On Monday Al Zaman

37 Dead in Attacks on Monday

Al-Zaman, the ‘Times of Baghdad,’ refers to “a sudden and unprecedented deterioration of the security situation in Baghdad” on Monday. The biggest single attack, however, took place in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil.

Louise Roug of the Los Angeles Times reports that suicide attackers killed 36 [the Scotsman says 37] persons in Iraq on Monday and wounded well over a hundred. She writes,

‘ The bloodiest attack took place in a dusty field behind Irbil’s traffic-police headquarters, where a suicide car bomber killed 13 [late reports say 15] and wounded 100 during police officers’ morning workout. In a second attack in the mainly Kurdish town, a suicide bomber killed a local security official and two of his guards as their convoy passed a cemetery. ‘

The Scotsman describes the bomb attack on the police chief of Halabja, which killed him and three bodyguards. The Kurds of Halabja were gassed by Saddam in 1988, leaving 5000 dead.

There was also an attack on a checkpoint outside the disputed oil city of Kirkuk, killing 4 soldiers.

Guerrillas launched 5 separate attacks in Baghdad, including one at a military checkpoint on the airport road. Another military checkpoint received mortar fire.

al-Zaman: Fourteen neighborhoods of Baghdad near Karkh were deprived for a second straight day of drinking water, after a water main had been sabotaged early Sunday morning.

Armed guerrillas disguised in the uniforms of Iraqi army troops assassinated two leaders of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq after they invaded their homes in the Abu Saida quarter of the city of Baquba. This according to a police colonel who asked not to be identified.

A funeral procession was held in Basra for Shaikh Abd al-Salam Alwan, a tribal chieftain of the al-Ghanim clan. He had been kidnapped, tortured and killed, his body dumped in the al-Haritha district.

Shaikh Usama al-Jadaan al-Sanad, who described himself as chief of the Karabilah tribe, said in a press conference on Monday in Baghdad, “We ask that first aid be sent to the districts of Qaim and Karabilah because they lack the simplest medical facilities.” He added, “The secretary-generals of the parties that run the government in Iraq must stop the shedding of innocent blood in Qaim and Karabilah that is being carried out under the pretext of the presence of Arab and foreign terrorists.”

Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani warned that those who oppose (loose) federalism in favor of centralized government in Iraq are in reality working for a partition of the country.

The Sunni Pious Endowments Board issued a plea that the usurpation of Sunni mosques in the southern, largely Shiite city of Amara cease. It alleged that a group of persons supported by Iraqi police occupied the Hatin Mosque in Amara. The governor of Maysan province then ordered that the mosque by locked up until the question of its ownership could be decided. Several other Sunni mosques, it alleged, have also been usurped there.

Maysan province is politically dominated by followers of Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr.