Iraq Violence Kills Scores, Including 3 Americans

Mar 28, 08:40 PM

Current Headlines: By Kim Gamel

Two truck bombs shattered markets in Tal Afar on Tuesday, killing at least 63 people and wounding dozens in the second assault in four days on a predominantly Shiite Muslim city.

The resurgence in violence comes a year after Tal Afar was held up as a symbol of U.S. success.

After the bombings, suspected Sunni insurgents tried to ambush ambulances carrying the injured out of the northwestern city but were driven off by police gunfire, authorities said.

The carnage was the worst bloodshed in a day of attacks across Iraq.

The 1920 Revolution Brigades, a major Sunni Arab insurgent group, reported that its military leader had been slain in Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad. The death of Harith Dhaher al-Dhari was likely to deepen an increasingly bloody rift between al-Qaida in Iraq and opponents of the terror group in Sunni communities west of the capital.

In Baghdad, a U.S. soldier and an American working as a U.S. government contractor were killed by a rocket attack on the heavily guarded Green Zone, U.S. officials said. Another contract worker suffered serious wounds and three were slightly wounded. A soldier also was wounded.

A U.S. Marine died during combat operations in Anbar province, a hotbed of Sunni Arab insurgents west of Baghdad, the military said.

The deaths raised the U.S. toll to 3,242 since the war began in March 2003.

U.S. soldiers, meanwhile, foiled two suicide truck bombers trying to attack their base in a small town 50 miles west of Baghdad and killed as many as 15 attackers, the military said. It said eight soldiers suffered wounds, all but one of them minor, during the firefight in Karmah.

Iraqi police reported at least 109 people killed or found dead nationwide. The toll included two elderly sisters -- both Chaldean Catholic nuns in the increasingly tense city of Kirkuk -- who were stabbed multiple times in what appeared to be a sectarian killing.

Most of the bloodshed in Tal Afar came when an explosives-laden truck was detonated by remote control as people gathered to buy flour it was carrying in the center of town, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad. A few minutes earlier, a truck loaded with vegetables blew up near a wholesale market on the city's north side.

Saturday, a man wearing an explosives belt blew himself up outside a pastry shop in Tal Afar's central market area, killing at least 10 people.

Tal Afar was an insurgent stronghold until an offensive by U.S. and Iraqi troops in September 2005, when rebel fighters fled into the countryside without a battle. Last March, President Bush cited the operation as an example that gave him "confidence in our strategy."

But even though U.S. and Iraqi forces put up sand barriers around Tal Afar to limit access, the city has suffered frequent insurgent attacks.

Among the largest previous attacks were suicide bombings that killed 20 people on Sept. 18 and 30 on Oct. 11, 2005.

In other bombings Tuesday, suicide car bombers struck northeast of Ramadi, killing 10 people, and in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, killing two policemen and wounding four people, police said.

The vehicle bombings and an outbreak of sectarian clashes in southern Iraq underscored concerns that militants have fled the capital in response to the U.S.-led security crackdown, bringing violence with them to the hinterlands.

Nationwide, the number of deaths from car bombs has decreased slightly since the Baghdad security operation began Feb. 14, but it has more than doubled in areas outside the capital, according to an Associated Press tally.

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