BAGHDAD, Dec. 3 -- Iraqi insurgents staged nearly simultaneous attacks Friday morning on police stations at opposite ends of Baghdad, killing at least 30 people, freeing dozens of prisoners and emptying a police arsenal in a demonstration of the militants' strength in the heart of the country.
Hours later insurgents rose up in Mosul, overrunning many points in the western sector of Iraq's third-largest city.
U.S. soldiers inspect the site of a car bomb attack outside a Shiite Muslim mosque in Baghdad's northern Adhamiya district on Friday.
(AFP)
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Video: Simultaneous attacks in Baghdad kill 30, including at least 16 police officers in the deadliest insurgent attacks in weeks.
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The strikes employed small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and a potent car bomb, the insurgents' time-tested methods. As in many such attacks, most of those killed during the fighting appeared to be members of Iraq's beleaguered police force. Just after noon the group led by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant, claimed responsibility for the attacks on a Web site known for carrying its statements.
Sixteen police officers were killed after dozens of armed militants overran the police station in the southern neighborhood of Saydiya after an hours-long gun battle.
Across town in Adhamiya, a restive Sunni Muslim neighborhood that U.S. military officials have said may be serving as a sanctuary for insurgents who fled fighting in Fallujah, a car bomb exploded around 6 a.m. on the cool Muslim Sabbath, according to police officials.
The explosion occurred in front of a Shiite Muslim mosque and killed an estimated 14 people while wounding more than 20 others. Several witnesses said a small blast drew people outside to see what happened at the mosque, which sits near an Iraqi police station, when a larger explosion detonated to deadly effect.
Soon afterward, fighting erupted between Iraqi police and militants, who fired on the police station with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
As columns of black smoke filled the morning sky, a U.S. warplane swooped over the neighborhood and fired several missiles at targets on the ground. Apache helicopters also fired into the neighborhood during a firefight that witnesses said lasted roughly 90 minutes.
In the chaotic aftermath, Iraqi police struggled to keep the people away from the scene by cracking shots from AK-47s into the air and along the pavement. Local merchants fled inside shops whose shutters were riddled with bullets in near-panic.
"My house was destroyed during the war by the Americans," said Mohammed, 27, who sells CDs and cassette tapes nearby and declined to give his last name for security reasons. "From that moment until now I have hated the Americans. I support the resistance," he said. But "I don't want the people to be hurt."
The attacks marked the second day of intense insurgent activity in the capital after a period of relative calm following the U.S. military push into Fallujah, the Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad that had served as a militant staging ground.
In recent weeks, Mosul has become a leading center of insurgent activity, an alarming downward turn given its size and central importance to commerce and security in the north.
Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, said insurgents attacked several U.S. and Iraqi military installations Friday morning with mortar and rocket-propelled grenade fire from sites in western Mosul, the Arab sector of a city with significant Kurdish and Turkmen populations. Many insurgents could be seen in the streets, Koran said.
"We had helicopters in the sky, and I think the insurgents have now disappeared," Koran said. "They don't have any control of buildings, but you can see them in groups of five to 20 men with weapons in the streets or making checkpoints. Just showing themselves."
