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Mortar blast kills 3 kids, uncle in Iraq
A mortar barrage killed three Iraqi children and their uncle as they played together outside their Baghdad home, the latest deaths in an insurgency that claimed a total of six lives Wednesday and showed no signs of slowing down. Twelve-year-old Sabaa Haitham, her brother Sajjad, 10, and their 8-year-old cousin Mina Mohammed Abid died when one of two mortar rounds slammed into their home in the southern Doura neighborhood, Yarmouk hospital morgue official Razzak Hassan said. The children's uncle, Lu'ay Salih, in his mid-20s, also was killed in the 6 p.m. explosions that peppered their victims with razor sharp pieces of shrapnel. "What have those kids done to deserve this? They were just playing in the front yard," said grieving Haitham Salih, father of Sabaa and Sajjad, outside his demolished house. "It's a disaster. I lost two of my children, my brother and my niece." Insurgents also trained their guns again on Iraq's fledgling security forces, who have become daily targets during a wave of violence that has killed at least 772 people since the April 28 announcement of Iraq's new government, according to an Associated Press count. Two policemen were killed in drive-by shootings in western Baghdad's Amil district and the northern city of Samarra, police said. The numbers of Iraqi police, soldiers and civilians killed sharply increased in May, according to officials from three government ministries. It was unclear if the ministries were working with the same set of data. Some 151 police were killed in May, compared with 86 in April, up 75 percent, an Interior Ministry official said. At least 325 policemen were wounded in May, compared with 131 in April. Dr. Sabah al-Araji of the Health Ministry said 434 civilians were killed in May, up from 299 in April. Some 775 civilians were wounded last month, compared with 598 in April. A Defense Ministry official said 85 Iraqi soldiers died in May, compared with 40 in April. An additional 79 soldiers were wounded, compared with 63 in April. Defense Ministry spokesman Radhi Badir, who has been tallying insurgents killed in Iraq, told the AP that more than 260 insurgents were killed in May, including about 140 in two U.S.-led offensives in western Iraq. A suicide bomber attacked a queue of vehicles waiting at the heavily guarded main checkpoint to Baghdad's International Airport early Wednesday, wounding 15 Iraqis and signaling the vulnerability of even Iraq's most vital facilities. Eleven Iraqis inside a Shiite mosque were wounded when a car bomb exploded outside a Shiite mosque in the Khalis area, some 12 miles east of the city of Baqouba, said army Col. Abdullah al-Shamri. Amid the violence, Iraq reached out to the international community for greater security and political aid. In New York, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said U.S.-led forces must remain in Iraq until the country's own soldiers and police can take responsibility for securing the nation. "I'm a realist, OK, and we've seen that before. We need to complete this mission with their help," Zebari told the AP in New York late Tuesday. Acting U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson, speaking on behalf of the 160,000-strong mainly U.S. multinational force, said if Iraqi authorities need the force to stay, it shouldn't leave "until the Iraqis can meet the serious security challenges they face." Following another Iraqi request, the U.S. and European Union will hold a ministerial level meeting June 22 in Belgium to let the new government lay out "its priorities, vision and strategies" ahead of elections later this year, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. More than 80 countries and international organizations have been invited and Iraq will send a large delegation, Boucher said. In a sign of how violence and politics merge here, officials in Iraq's volatile Anbar province chose a new governor just days after his predecessor was found dead in a hide-out for foreign fighters. Anbar council member Khibir al-Abdali said colleague Maamoun Sami Rashid al-Alwani was chosen to succeed former governor Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi, whose body was found Sunday bound, gagged and chained to a propane tank inside a building used by foreign fighters. Al-Mahalawi was abducted May 10 and his body was found in Rawah, northwest of Baghdad, after a fierce battle between foreign fighters holding him inside the building and U.S. troops outside. The former governor died from severe head trauma, said the U.S. military, apparently from rubble that collapsed after the building was damaged by the fighting. The U.S. military also announced the capture of a former Saddam Hussein regime spy Monday, who was among at least 113 terror suspects detained during U.S.-Iraqi raids throughout Baghdad since Sunday. |
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