At Least 75 Are Killed in Two Attacks in Iraq

At Least 75 Are Killed in Two Attacks in Iraq
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/world/middleeast/24iraq.html?ref=global-home


BAGHDAD — At least 75 people were killed and 120 wounded in two explosions in Iraq on Thursday that shook a quiet residential Baghdad neighborhood and a restive city north of the capital where Iranian tourists were attacked.

Also on Thursday, a major leader of the Sunni insurgency, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, was captured in Baghdad, according to Major General Qassim Atta, the Army official responsible for security in the capital. Mr. Baghdadi is the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of Sunni militant forces believed to include Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The overall level of violence in Iraq is at its lowest since the American invasion in 2003. But a series of recent attacks, highly organized and carried out under tight security, have raised worries that Baathist and jihadi militants are regrouping into a smaller but still lethal insurgency seeking to reassert itself as American troops reduce their presence on the ground in advance of their full withdrawal in 2011.

In the first bombing, a woman wearing a suicide belt hidden under a black cloak exploded herself in the Karada district of Baghdad as dozens of people lined up at a food giveaway being run by the Iraqi police and Red Cresent. Twenty-eight people were killed, including 12 police officers, and 50 were wounded, according to an official with the Interior Ministry.

Karada, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in central Baghdad, has been relatively calm for the last several months. At the time of the bombing, dozens of women with their children were receiving handouts of canned tomatoes, bags of flour, and cooking oil on the street in front of an apartment building.

In the blast’s aftermath, the street was littered with bags of flour and red apples, and pieces of human flesh attracted masses of flies. One woman who said she did not know what had happened to her children sat on the sidewalk wailing. Iraqis arrived in tears to search for missing family members.

In the second attack, in Muqdadiya in Diyala Province, a bomb went off inside a restaurant where a group of Iranian tourists were eating lunch, killing 47 and wounding 70, according to police officials. All but five of the dead and wounded appeared to be Iranians. It was not immediately clear whether the explosion had been caused by a suicide bomber.

The target of the bombing was a restaurant on a route close to the Iranian border where Iranian tourists stop on their way to visit Shiite holy sites in Karbala and other cities in Iraq. Three buses full of pilgrims — men, women and children —had just disembarked and entered the restaurant when the explosion occurred, police said.

The insurgent leader who Iraqi authorities said was captured, Mr. Baghdadi, is a figure so shadowy that many, including the American military, have doubted that he even exists. In the past, Iraqi officials have reported al-Baghdadi’s arrest or killing, only to later say they were wrong, news services reported.

There are no known pictures of the elusive Iraqi jihadist and in 2007, the American military said he was actually a fictional character whose declarations on audiotape were read by a man named Abu Abdullah al-Naima.

American officials could not immediately confirm the arrest.

In November, following President Obama’s election, a man identifying himself as Mr. Baghdadi delivered was a 25-minute audio message in which he argued that Mr. Obama’s win represented a victory for radical Islamic groups that had battled American forces since the invasion of Iraq.

“And the other truth that politicians are embarrassed to admit,” the taped voice said, “is that their unjust war on the houses of Islam, with its heavy and successive losses and the continuous operations of exhaustion of your power and your economy, were the principal cause of the collapse of the economic giant.”