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September 7th,
2009 - Iraqi Checkpoints New Focus for Insurgents |
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Iraqi
Checkpoints New Focus for Insurgents By Marc Santora New York Times September 7, 2009 Baghdad - Insurgents
detonated bombs and threw grenades on Monday at five Iraqi police and Army
checkpoints, the most visible deterrent the Iraqi government has to foil
attacks. The most deadly was a
suicide truck bombing in the western city of Ramadi, which was once a power
center for fighters loyal to the government of Saddam Hussein. There, a suicide bomber
driving a truck laden with explosives was stopped at a police checkpoint just
outside the city when he struck, killing seven people and wounding a dozen
more and setting a half-dozen cars ablaze. At least four of those killed were
policemen, and other victims included women and children, according to a
local security official. Security officials said the
explosion would have caused more damage had the driver detonated in a more
populous area. “The attacks will continue,”
said Maj. Gen. Tariq al-Asal, the police commander in Anbar Province, the
largely Sunni region where Ramadi is located. He noted the difficulty of
stopping people determined to blow themselves up. “But the number of victims
is limited,” he said, “because the police are capable of foiling the
attackers and preventing them from reaching their destination.” Checkpoints, along with
blast walls, have become an omnipresent feature of the Iraqi landscape.
Hundreds of thousands of police officers and Army soldiers remain posted at
roads inside cities, towns and villages and also on the roadways that link
those population centers. They vary greatly in size
and sophistication, ranging from a lone soldier sitting at a chair on a
little-traveled side street, a machine gun propped up by his knees, to dozens
of security officers surrounded by blast wall, checking identification cards
of motorists and waving cars off to the side of the road to be searched. At the height of the
sectarian killing, fake checkpoints became so common that Iraqis feared
traveling from one neighborhood to another. But there have been few such
incidents in the last year. As the Americans were preparing to withdraw from
the cities this spring, Iraqis even began decorating the concrete barriers at
their checkpoints with plastic flowers. After the devastating
bombings last month in the heart of Baghdad, the Iraqi government said that
vigilance at all the country’s checkpoints would be stepped up. For those seeking to
undermine the Iraqi government, attacking checkpoints is a natural way to
undermine public confidence. However, the attacks at checkpoints could also
indicate a frustration at being able to penetrate attack more populated
areas, Iraqi officials said. In Baghdad, there were at
least three separate attacks on police and army checkpoints on Monday,
killing at least one civilian and wounding more than 20 others, according to
Iraqi security official. Unlike the attack in Ramadi,
two of the attacks in Baghdad used unwitting civilians to strike the checkpoints,
according the Iraqi security officials. In the first attack in Sadr City,
they attached what is known a “sticky bomb” to the bottom of an unsuspecting
civilian’s vehicle, according to Iraqi security officials, and detonated it
at the checkpoint. Five people were wounded, including two members of the
Iraqi Army, according to Iraqi officials. Residents in the area said at least
one civilian was killed, but that could not be confirmed. In a later attack across the
city Monday afternoon, the same tactic of placing a sticky bomb on a civilian
car was used to attack a checkpoint, killing one civilian and wounding eight
others, including two policemen. Separately, in Baghdad on
Monday an insurgent lobbed a grenade at an Iraqi Army checkpoint, wounding six
people, including two soldiers. In Baquba, a city in Diyala
Province, a man wearing an Iraqi Army uniform approached a checkpoint Monday
evening, and when guards approached he blew himself up, killing three and
wounding 10 more people, according to local security officials. In the more restive areas in
the city of Mosul and in Diyala Province, both believed to be strongholds of
insurgents looking to challenge the current Iraqi government, there were also
attacks, as there have been nearly every day this month. For instance, in Diyala,
eight people have been killed and 34 wounded in attacks over the last seven
days alone. Abeer Mohammed and Mohammed
Hussein contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New
York Times from Ramadi and Diyala Province. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/middleeast/08iraq.html |