"War on Terror" for the lose.


BAGHDAD — As the flooding from broken water mains and sewers ebbed on Monday, workers pored over the wreckage from the Baghdad bomb blasts a day earlier, recovering still more bodies, including 30 children at a day-care center playground.

The official death toll climbed to 155, with more than 500 wounded.

The extent of the damage was even worse than initially feared, with three major government buildings destroyed rather than the two at first thought to have been targeted by Sunday’s pair of suicide vehicle bombs.

The first blast that gutted much of the Ministry of Justice also did similar damage to the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works, located just across the street. The area had been sealed off from the press by authorities on Sunday. The second blast, which came a minute later, destroyed the Baghdad Provincial Council building a quarter-mile away.

Monday, workers were still hunting for victims inside the tangled debris of collapsed ceilings and walls inside those two seven-story high buildings.

A police official stationed at the Ministry of Justice, Hussein Issa, became distraught as a body bag holding the remains of a small person was loaded into a refrigerated van. “Unfortunately our government will not tell the real number of how many were killed,” he said. “Why don’t the terrorists go down and attack the government sitting there in the Green Zone, these were just people doing their jobs.”

The prime minister, president and other top officials have their offices inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, less than a mile from the bomb sites.

Among the victims, Mr. Issa said, were 30 children killed in the Justice Ministry’s day care center. Most were in the center’s playground, close to the street, when the bomb went off, knocking down protective blast walls. “There were children killed in the swings, others who died right where they sat on the see-saws,” said Usay Ednan, a 33-year-old taxi driver who lives nearby and said he was among the first rescuers.

Police at the scene speculated that the force of the explosion was equal to five tons of TNT, which if true would make initial reports that the bombs were carried in cars unlikely. The two badly damaged ministries were on opposite sides of a wide road.

An official at the Ministry of Interior, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said investigators were working on the theory that the bomb outside the Ministry of Justice was in a minivan, while that at the provincial council was in a water tanker.

No one has so far claimed responsibility for the pair of bombings, but they were remarkably similar to a pair of coordinated attacks last Aug. 19th targeting the Foreign and Finance Ministry buildings.

Credit for those attacks was claimed on Aug. 24th by the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group that includes al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leadership. Many analysts view the I.S.I. as no more than a front for al-Qaeda.

“The ground shook beneath their feet and their hearts were torn from fear and terror,” the group boasted in a posting on a jihadi website, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist groups’ internet activities.

Curiously, the ISI also claimed in the same postings to have attacked the Baghdad Provincial Council building at the same time as the Foreign and Finance Ministries, which was not true.

Iraq’s hospitals coped well with the influx of wounded, said Dr. Thamer al-Ali, director of Al-Kindi Hospital, the nearest to the scene. “Unfortunately we are accustomed to such crises,” he said. “We haven’t lost any of the wounded victims. All who reached here are still alive.”

The second blast took place close to an old Anglican church, St. George’s, but fortunately before Sunday services so no one was hurt despite extensive damage to the church’s charity clinic.

Caretaker Edward Edmond was repairing the roof and had a good view of one side of the Baghdad Provincial Council building when the second blast occurred. “I saw the body of a female employee blown out the window,” he said.

The church would have been much more heavily damaged, said lay pastor Faiz Georges, if a windstorm had not blown a tree down on the road outside the night before. That forced the bomber to use the other side of the road. “It was a miracle,” Georges said.

The church, built by the British military during their occupation of Iraq in the 1920s, had lost some of its famous stained-glass windows when the United States bombed a nearby building in 1992, and more were destroyed during the invasion in 2003, Mr.

Edmond said. There were three left, and they were destroyed Sunday, he said.

Earlier in October, a spokesman for the U.S. military, Brigadier General Stephen R. Lanza, said that high profile attacks such as suicide bombings have been generally on the decline, with longer and longer periods between each such attack, suggesting a diminished capacity among insurgents to mount such attacks.

He also said the government had learned from the Aug. 19th attacks. “The government of Iraq reassessed its security measures, adjusted, enhanced and increased its security operations,” he said.

“We are confident the government of Iraq is doing the right things in these areas.”

Lanza said high profile attacks through October 12, 2009 had declined 51 percent compared to the same period in 2008.

After the August bombings, Iraqi officials arrested two men who they said were a Baathist Party member and an al-Qaeda member, and televised their confessions. They also arrested police and military officers responsible for security lapses. None has so far been tried, and U.S. officials have cast doubt on the validity of the confessions.

Elsewhere in Iraq, a suicide car bomber struck a checkpoint outside Karbala Monday afternoon, killing four civilians, according to Sattar Ardawi, chief of the Karbala provincial council’s security committee.

In Babel Province south of Baghdad, three beheaded bodies were found Monday at an abandoned farm about 25 miles north of Hilla, one of them an Iraqi soldier, according to a security source in the provincial government. In Mosul, in northern Iraq, four persons died in three separate attacks Monday.


Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/middleeast/27iraq.html?_r=1