Car Bombs Rock Iraq, Killing at Least 19
    Agence France-Presse

    Thursday 18 January 2007

    Car bombs have rocked Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul, killing at least 19 people, as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki pressed Washington to better equip his army so that foreign troops can withdraw from Iraq.

    Insurgents detonated five car bombs in the Iraqi capital, where nearly 50 people were wounded in addition to those killed, a security official said.

    Three car bombs exploded almost simultaneously in the southern district of Dora, leaving 10 people dead and 30 wounded.

    The bombs targeted the Al-Rasheed vegetable market, the main market in southern Baghdad which is often crammed with residents shopping for food.

    Four more people were killed, including two police officers, and 11 wounded when a car bomb struck a police patrol near the Sinbad cinema in central Baghdad.

    A fifth bomb blasted southeastern Baghdad's Khamsara district, killing three people and wounding seven, while in Mosul, yet another car packed with explosives killed one person and wounded five others.

    After a brief lull at the start of the year, a wave of violence in the past three days has left more than 150 people dead, mostly in the Iraqi capital.

    The latest attacks came as Iraqi and US authorities scramble to curb violence in the capital.

    The main focus of a plan unveiled last week by US President George W. Bush is to stop the communal bloodletting between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that left thousands dead last year in Baghdad.

    The United Nations said Tuesday that more than 34,000 people had been killed across Iraq in 2006, mostly in Baghdad and largely owing to sectarian strife.

    But Maliki's spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh contested the UN report Thursday, saying "it does not reflect the reality on the ground."

    Dabbagh said the government could not provide its own casualty figures, "because we have been unable to gather them due to security reasons."

    Sectarian conflict has stymied Bush's plan to start withdrawing troops from Iraq and became a key factor in his party's US congressional election defeat.

    But Maliki said the withdrawal of foreign troops could get started if the United States armed his soldiers with better weapons to take on Sunni insurgents as well as Shiite militias.

    "If we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces, I think that within three to six months our need for American troops will dramatically go down," Maliki was quoted Thursday as saying by The Times newspaper in London.

    The United States has resisted supplying Iraqi troops with heavy or advanced weapons because other arms have occasionally ended up in the hands of militia forces and even insurgents.

    Speaking to The Times, White House national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe admitted that some of Maliki's points were valid.

    "We have had to re-do our training and equipment programme," Johndroe said.

    Maliki also shot back at US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who said recently that his government was on "borrowed time."

    "Certain officials are going through a crisis. Secretary Rice is expressing her own point of view if she thinks that the government is on borrowed time," he told The Times.

    In another jibe at US efforts to stabilise Iraq, Tehran's ambassador to Baghdad said Iran stood ready to help Iraqi security forces fight terrorism.

    "Iran is disposed to helping to train and equip Iraqi security forces to combat terrorism," Hassan Kazemi told a press conference.

    He demanded to be shown "any shred of evidence that Iran is working to destabilise Iraq," as the United States alleges.

    Maliki's spokesman Dabbagh said Iraq was working to obtain the release of five Iranians detained by US forces a week ago on suspicion of aiding Shiite militias and preparing attacks against coalition forces.

    But he said "the detainees are not diplomats," as Tehran maintains.