Baghdad Blast Targets Sunni Tribal Leaders
Bombings in Iraq Kill at Least 54

By John Ward Anderson and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 26, 2007

BAGHDAD, June 25 -- Five bombings struck Iraq on Monday, killing at least 54 people, including 12 who died in a suicide attack at a Baghdad hotel frequented by members of Iraq's parliament and Chinese diplomats, U.S. military and Iraqi security officials said.

Police and witnesses said that the Mansour Hotel blast apparently targeted a group of Sunni tribal leaders from Anbar province west of Baghdad, killing six of them.

The tribes have formed an umbrella group, called the Anbar Salvation Council, which is cooperating with U.S. forces in an offensive against the Sunni extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The council recently has been racked by internal divisions, and the group of tribal leaders meeting at the hotel recently had broken away from the main council, according to Sabir al-Dulaimi, 47, a leader who was to attend the hotel meeting but said he arrived late because of traffic.

"The indiscriminate attacks killed numerous civilians, some of whom were Sunni and Shi'a sheiks meeting in Baghdad in an attempt to further national reconciliation," U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus, chief commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said in a joint statement.

The dead included Fasal al-Gaood, a former governor of Anbar, and Rahim al-Maliki, a well-known poet who was also a producer and anchor at state-run al-Iraqiya TV. The network ran a black mourning ribbon across the corner of its screen Monday.

"Receiving this news about the killing of Sheik Fasal is a catastrophe," his son, Belasim al-Gaood, said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan. "He was Iraq's first man, and he was defending all Iraqis, not only Sunnis."

Maj. Gen. Jihad al-Jabri of the Interior Ministry said on al-Iraqiya that its investigation was focusing on people inside the hotel -- either guests or employees -- because the explosive vest used was too big to go unnoticed at the hotel's security checkpoints.

In the single deadliest incident of the day, a suicide truck bomber drove a loaded oil tanker into the side of the police station in Baiji, about 125 miles north of the capital, causing a huge explosion that collapsed part of the building, police Capt. Bilal al-Qayissi said. He said the 8:20 a.m. blast killed 30 policemen and prisoners held at the station and wounded 55 other people.

"A ball of fire came out of the police station and hit the shops across the street," said Ahmed Abdullah, 30, the owner of a nearby tire repair shop. "It was just like a horror movie. The last thing I remember is that my clothes and hair caught fire," he recalled at a local hospital.

A U.S. military spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, relayed a different version of events, saying that the police station, which was a joint security center with Iraqi police and U.S. troops, was hit by two car bombs, followed by an attack from insurgents firing small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. He said Iraqi forces repelled the attack. There were no reports of U.S. casualties, he said.

Qayissi said that U.S. forces came to secure the area and posted snipers on nearby roofs who shot and killed four civilians, including a woman looking for her son in the rubble.

Garver said the military has checked accounts of sniper killings and had "no reports of anything like that."

Earlier, at 6:30 a.m., a suicide attacker rammed a black Chevy Caprice into a group of cadets outside the Hilla police station, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, and detonated explosives, killing eight people and wounding 31, police said.

"We do not know where the car came from," said Ahmed al-Mosawi, a guard at the building who was being treated for injuries at a local hospital and who was interviewed by telephone. "There was an explosion and a big blast, and a dust cloud went up and I lost consciousness."

When he awoke, Mosawi said, "There were uniforms and weapons spread everywhere, and there were big stains of blood on the ground." He wept. "I have been granted a new life."

A car bomb in the northern city of Mosul killed two policemen and injured 20 people, local police said.

The Reuters news service reported that a suicide car bomber exploded his vehicle at a police checkpoint in Siniyah, nine miles west of Baiji, killing two soldiers and wounding three.

Against the backdrop of violence, the International Crisis Group, an independent research organization, released a report Monday sharply critical of the British military operation in the southern port city of Basra, saying that "the city's descent into chaos under British occupation" is an example of what could happen in Baghdad.

The report says Basra is beset by a "bloody competition for resources" that has undermined the government and fostered "terror between rival militias" engaged in cycles of retaliatory violence.

Asserting that "violence has become a routine means of social interaction," the report's authors conclude that the "Basra experience suggests the most likely outcome in Iraq is its untidy break-up into myriad fiefdoms, superficially held together by the presence of coalition forces."

A British military spokesman could not be reached for comment late Monday.

Robert Malley, the group's Middle East program director, said in a statement that U.S. and British officials should "acknowledge that their so-called Iraqi partners, far from building a new state, are tirelessly working to tear it down."

Special correspondents Yasmin Mousa in Amman, Dahlia Farooq in Baghdad and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.