Rioting Follows Bombings That Kill 21
15 June, 2004
Houston Chronicle
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In some of the worst rioting since the fall of Baghdad, hundreds of Iraqis threw stones at U.S. soldiers, burned an American flag and danced around the charred body of a foreign contractor Monday after a suicide bomber rammed a truck packed with explosives into a convoy in a busy Baghdad neighborhood killing at least 13 people.
Around the same time, two more bombs exploded, one south of the capital, one north, killing eight more, making it one of the deadliest days in Iraq in the past month.
One American, two Britons, a French citizen and a Filipino were killed in the Baghdad bombing, military officials said. Three were General Electric employees working on power plants in Iraq, and two were their security guards. They have not been identified.
U.S. officials said 62 people were injured, including 10 foreign contractors. Hospital officials said many of the wounded had lost limbs.
As more than 50 Iraqi policemen stood by, the Baghdad mob stomped on the hoods of the crushed vehicles, doused them with kerosene and set them alight, sparking a huge fire in the middle of a crowded neighborhood.
Even as angry men ran past them, slipping through police lines to hurl bricks at a squad of U.S. soldiers, few of the Iraqi police intervened.
"What are we to do?" asked an Iraqi police lieutenant, Wisam Deab. "If we try to stop them, they will think we are helping the Americans. Then they will turn on us."
The crowd became increasingly hostile, with one man shaking a severed finger, apparently from one of the people killed by the bombing, at a British reporter.
In Baghdad, the rumble of explosions has become almost like a morning alarm clock. Many of the bombs go off between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., during rush hour.
U.S. and Iraqi officials say they are improving security cooperation in the lead-up to June 30, sharing more intelligence and conducting more joint operations.
But at the Baghdad bombing on Monday, there was very little communication between the two sides. As clouds of black smoke boiled up from the street and the mob grew increasingly unruly, U.S. soldiers waited in their Humvees 50 yards behind Iraqi policemen, with neither group talking much with the other.
Yet at the precise moment that the violence is peaking in Iraq, U.S. forces are deferring increasingly to Iraqi security services. Much of the political handover has already happened, and U.S. officials say it is now important to allow Iraqi security services to play a bigger role. As a result, a power vacuum seems to be forming.
According to witnesses, the contractors were driving near Tahir Square in central Baghdad about 9:30 a.m. on a street they often use to commute to work when a truck came zooming up, against traffic, and slammed into their vehicles.
The explosion blasted one vehicle off the road and into a garden 30 feet away. The explosion also ripped the facade off a nearby hotel and gutted several photography shops and juice stands.
Hussein Atiha was selling watermelon up the street when he said his stand was nearly knocked over by the bomb. Like many Iraqis, he seemed divided in his thoughts on the occupation, the future and the rising violence.
At one moment, as he watched the mob pound and kick the destroyed vehicles, Atiha shook his head.
"That is wrong," he said. "That is disrespectful."
But the next moment, Atiha, 21, said of the foreigners, "We have lost more than them. They deserve this."
Witnesses to the other bombings said that four Iraqi civil defense soldiers were killed at 9:45 a.m. on a busy street in Mosul, in northern Iraq, after their patrol hit a roadside bomb.
The Associated Press reported that around the same time four people were killed in Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad, when a suicide bomber drove between two police vehicles and detonated explosives.
American and Iraqi officials blamed the attacks on terrorists connected to al-Qaida.
There was a hint of good news Monday: Around 9 a.m., a convoy of Marines drove into the heart of the troubled city of Fallujah, conducted a three-hour meeting with sheikhs and then drove out without a shot being fired.
Fallujah remains one of the tensest places in Iraq, even after the Marines agreed last month to pull out of the city and allow an all-Iraqi security force to patrol the streets.
Masked insurgents continue to operate, though on Monday they were nowhere to be seen.