50 dead in attacks targeting Iraqi security forces

Insurgents have been stepping up their attacks on Iraq's security forces in recent months as the US has trimmed its military presence in the country. More than half of those killed Wednesday - 27 - were Iraqi soldiers and policemen.

There were no claims of responsibility for the spate of attacks. But their scale and reach, from one end of the country to the other, underscored insurgent efforts to prove their might against security forces and political leaders who are charged with the day-to-day running and stability of Iraq.

The deadliest attack came in Kut, 160 km southeast of Baghdad, where a suicide bomber blew up a car inside a security barrier between a police station and the provincial government's headquarters.

Police and hospital officials said 19 people were killed, all but one of them policemen. An estimated 90 people were wounded.

A similar attack struck a north Baghdad neighborhood, where a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb in a parking lot behind a police station.

Fifteen people were killed in that attack, including six policemen. Police and hospital officials said another 58 were wounded in the explosion that left a crater three meters wide and trapped people beneath the rubble of felled houses nearby.

Five others, including an Iraqi soldier and a police officer, were killed in small bursts of violence in Baghdad.

A senior Iraqi intelligence official raised the possibility that some of the attackers had inside help. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the Baghdad suicide bombing bore the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda, but said unnamed political factions helped coordinate some of the other attacks. He refused to elaborate.

Since Iraq's March 7 elections failed to produce a clear winner, US officials have feared that competing political factions could stir up widespread violence. Iraqi leaders so far have tried to end the political impasse peacefully.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said the stalled government, combined with the American troop withdrawal, created ideal conditions for insurgents to attack. Even so, he said the security situation was "under control." "Here you have a government paralysis, you have a political vacuum ... you have the US troop withdrawal," Zebari told The Associated Press. "And in such environment these terrorist networks flourish actually and would love to deepen divisions among Iraqi politicians to apportion blame on each other in order to create as much chaos as possible." But US and Iraqi officials alike acknowledge growing frustration throughout the nation, nearly six months after the vote, and say that politically motivated violence could undo security gains made over the past few years, Kazinform cites Arab News. See www.arabnews.com for full version.