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Baghdad bloodbath kills 35

Over 200 wounded as Red Cross HQ, police stations made car bomb targets

AP, Baghdad
Car bombers struck the international Red Cross headquarters and four police stations across Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 35 people in a spree of destruction that terrorised the Iraqi capital on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, according to police and Red Cross reports.
The Red Cross said 12 were killed there, and police said 27 were killed in the police station bombings, most of them Iraqis but including at least one US soldier. The US authorities did not confirm an American death.
The bombings came hours after clashes in the Baghdad area killed three US soldiers overnight, and a day after insurgents devastated a hotel full of US occupation officials with a rocket barrage, killing a US colonel and wounding 18 other people. US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was in the hotel, but was unhurt.
It was two days of violence unprecedented in this city of 5 million people since the end of the US-Iraq war last April, attacks aimed at the American-led occupation and those perceived as working with it.
"We feel helpless when see this," a distraught Iraqi doctor said at the devastated Red Cross offices.
In Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, witnesses said US troops opened fire, killing at least four Iraqi civilians, after a roadside bomb exploded as a US military convoy passed. The US command did not immediately confirm the incident or any US casualties.
At the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross in central Baghdad, witnesses said a suicide bomber drove an explo-sives-packed vehicle, apparently an ambulance, right up to security barriers outside the building at about 8:30 a.m. and detonated it, blowing down the Red Cross's front wall, devastating the interior and blowing shrapnel and debris over a wide area.
The ICRC said at its headquarters in Geneva that 12 people were killed, including two of its Iraqi employees. Baghdad ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said she believed the employees were security guards.
Then, through the morning, four other vehicles exploded at police stations in the Baghdad area. Ambulances, sirens wailing, crisscrossed the city all morning.
"From what our indications are, none of those bombers got close to the target," Hertling said. But the explosions outside police stations left streetscapes of broken, bloody bodies and twisted, burning automobiles. Iraqi police reported some 27 people killed in those attacks, including 15 Iraqis at the ad-Doura station in southern Baghdad.
One US soldier was among them, and other Americans were wounded, said Lt. Sarmad al-Hakim, an ad-Doura officer. The US command did not immediately confirm those American casualties. Teams of US military police have been stationed at Baghdad police
stations in recent months.
At a fifth police station in central Baghdad, officers stopped a suicide bomber before he could detonate his Land Cruiser. "He was shouting, `Death to the Iraqi police! You're collaborators!'" said police Sgt. Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
Hertling said about 10 Iraqis were killed and 10 others wounded at the Red Cross bombing. Dr. Allawi Attiyah of the Ibn al-Nafeez hospital also put the toll at 10 dead, and said 12 were injured. Nada Doumani, Baghdad spokeswoman for ICRC, said she believed one or two of the Red Cross's Iraqi guards were killed.
Hertling said he believed the attacks may have been timed with the start of Ramadan in order to heighten tensions during the fasting month, when Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight hours and religious feelings run high.
Near the three-story ICRC building, cigarette vendor Ghani Khadim, 50, said he saw an Iraqi ambulance pass by his stand and approach the small compound some 100 yards away. It suddenly exploded, he said, and the blast blew out windows and injured his wife and daughter in his house behind his stand.
The vehicle had stopped some 60 feet in front of the Red Cross headquarters, "at a line of barrels we have had in front to protect the building," one Red Cross employee, who would not give his name.
The blast blew down a 40-foot section of the ICRC front wall, demolished a dozen cars in the area and apparently broke a water main, flooding the streets. The inside of the building was heavily damaged, littered with shattered glass, doors blown off their hinges, toppled bookcases and collapsed ceilings. A
gaping crack had opened in a back wall, some 100 yards from the blast site, where a crater some five yards across quickly filled with water.
The Red Cross staff member said someone began firing off an automatic weapon immediately after the explosion "100 bullets or more." He said he believed it was a gunmen somehow associated with the bomber "who wanted to scare people more."
Spokeswoman Doumani said more than 100 workers would normally be at ICRC after 9 a.m., but staffers said only about one-quarter that number were present at 8:30 a.m.
"Of course we don't understand why somebody would attack the Red Cross," she said. "The Red Cross has operated in this country since 1980, and we have not been involved in politics." Asked whether the organization would remain in Iraq, she replied: "I don't even know what we're going to do."
Two buildings away, the explosion devastated the interior of the Al-Nawal private polyclinic operated by Dr. Jamal F. Massa, 53, who had been planning to open it as a full-fledged hospital next month.
"We feel helpless when we see this," he said. He said he couldn't understand why the Red Cross would be attacked, since it had even reduced its foreign staff recently. "This only hurts guards and other Iraqis."
The Red Cross and other international aid organizations had reduced their Baghdad staffs after the car bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19, in which 23 people died in what appeared to be a warning against international support for the US occupation.
The US general Hertling said Monday was "a great day for the
Iraqi police" because security controls prevented the bombers from reaching their targets.
But Mouwafak al-Rabii, a Shiite Muslim member of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, said the United States must speed up the training of Iraqi police and soldiers and employ ruthless measures to crush the insurgency.
"There is no doubt about it that we need to change the rules of engagement with these people," al-Rabii told CNN. "The rules of engagement now are too lenient."
The rocket attack Sunday struck the Al-Rasheed Hotel, where Wolfowitz was staying at the end of a three-day Iraq visit. The deputy defense secretary said afterward that attack "will not deter us from completing our mission" in Iraq.
But the bold blow at the heart of the US presence here clearly rattled US confidence that it is defeating Iraq's shadowy insurgents.
"We'll have to get the security situation under control," Secretary of State Colin Powell told NBC's "Meet the Press."
The concrete western face of the 18-story hotel, located more than two miles west of the international Red Cross building, was pockmarked with a half-dozen or more blast holes. Windows shattered in at least two dozen rooms. The US command said the wounded included seven American civilians, four US military personnel and five non-US civilians working for the coalition.
Two Iraqi security guards also were hurt. The command did not immediately identify the dead American, but Wolfowitz said he was a US colonel.