IraqÂ’s seemingly inexhaustible corps of terror bombers struck across the country again on Thursday, from a restaurant in BaghdadÂ’s teeming Sadr City, to a police station leveled by a blast near the Syrian border. At least seven policemen and eight civilians were reported killed. The new blows against Iraqi government authority came as US military casualties rose toward a four-year death toll of 3,500, with 22 dead reported for the first six days of June, a relatively high casualty rate, almost double that of June 2006.
In the capitalÂ’s eastern Sadr City district, a bomb beneath a parked car exploded at lunchtime outside a falafel restaurant, police reported. At least three people were killed and eight wounded, said a police officer.
Earlier, in the dayÂ’s first reported attack, a suicide bomber blew up his explosives-laden truck at about 9am at a police station in Rabia, near IraqÂ’s border with Syria, killing at least four policemen and five civilians, and wounding 22 other people, an Iraqi army spokesman said.
A guard shot the driver as he approached the building, but the truck still penetrated its blast walls and exploded, destroying the one-story structure, said Capt Mohammed Ahmed of the armyÂ’s Third Division.
An hour later, in Ramadi, three policemen were killed and four others wounded when a suicide driver blew up his automobile at their checkpoint, police said. The post was just 50 meters (yards) from the traffic police headquarters, said another police officer.
In other attacks on Thursday, mortar shells landing in two districts of western Baghdad killed two civilians and wounded 12 others, police reported.
The US military reported four US soldiers were killed in separate incidents Tuesday and Wednesday – roadside bombings in eastern Baghdad and near Beiji, north of the capital, and an explosion and enemy gunfire in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. That lifted the US death toll in four years of war to 3,498. That raised the average rate of US troops deaths to about 4 per day in June, compared with 2 a day in June 2006.
On the offensive early on Thursday, a joint Iraqi-American force raided locations in Baghdad’s Sadr City and detained 16 suspected members of a “secret cell terrorist network” believed helping transport weapons, including advanced roadside bombs, from Iran to Iraq, the US command reported.
At midday, in another incident, an exploding roadside bomb targeting a US patrol wounded two Iraqi civilians in the Neiriya area of eastern Baghdad, and two others were wounded when the Americans opened fire randomly at the scene, an Iraqi police officer said. In another development, the British ambassador to Iraq, Dominic Asquith, issued an appeal to the kidnappers of five Britons, held since May 29, to release them or open negotiations.