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2 Car-bombers defy all
odds By Mike Davis
NEWS ITEM: Two truck bombs
struck markets in Tal Afar on Tuesday, killing at
least 66 people. One of the blasts occurred when
an explosives-laden truck was detonated by remote
control while people gathered to buy the flour it
was carrying in a Shi'ite neighborhood in the
center of the city, 420 kilometers northwest of
Baghdad.
Despite heroic reassurances
from both the White House and the Pentagon that
the six-week-old US escalation in Baghdad and al-
Anbar province is proceeding
on course, suicide car-bombers continue to
devastate Shi'ite and Sunni neighborhoods, often
under the noses of reinforced US patrols and
checkpoints.
Indeed, February was a record
month for car bombings, with at least 44 deadly
explosions in Baghdad alone, and March promises to
duplicate the carnage.
Car bombs,
moreover, continue to evolve in horror and
lethality. In January and March, the first
chemical "dirty bomb" explosions took place using
chlorine gas, giving potential new meaning to
President George W Bush's missing weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq.
The sectarian
guerrillas who claim affiliation with "al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia" are now striking savagely, and
seemingly at will, against dissident Sunni tribes
in Anbar province as well as Shi'ite areas of
Baghdad and Shi'ite pilgrims on the highways to
the south of the capital.
With each
massacre, the bombers refute Bush administration
claims that the US military can "take back and
secure" Baghdad block by block or establish its
own patrols and new, fortified mini-bases as a
realistic substitute for local self-defense
militias.
On February 23, for instance,
shortly after the beginning of the "surge", a
suicide truck-bomber killed 36 Sunnis in
Habbaniya, west of Baghdad, after an imam at a
local mosque had denounced al-Qaeda. Ten days
later, a kamikaze driver plowed his truck bomb
into Baghdad's famed literary bazaar, the crowded
corridor of bookstores and coffeehouses along
Mutanabi Street, incinerating at least 30 people
and, perhaps, the last hopes of an Iraqi
intellectual renaissance.
On March 10,
another suicide bomber massacred 20 people in Sadr
City, just a few hundred meters from one of the
new US bases. The next day, a bomber rammed his
car into flatbed truck full of Shi'ite pilgrims,
killing more than 30. A week later, horror
exceeded itself when a car bomber evidently used
two little children as a decoy to get through a
military checkpoint, then exploded the car with
the kids still in the back seat.
In a
demonstration of a tactic that has proved
especially deadly over the past year, a car-bomb
attack last Friday was coordinated with an
assailant in a suicide vest and almost killed
Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie, whose
tribal alliance, the Anbar Salvation Council, has
accepted funding from the Americans and been
denounced by the jihadis.
When it comes to
the development of suicide vehicles, however, the
most alarming innovation has, without doubt, been
the debut in January of truck bombs carrying
chlorine-gas tanks rigged with explosives.
Of course, "dirty bombs", usually of the
nuclear variety, have been a longtime obsession of
anti-terrorism experts (as well as the producers
of television potboilers), but the sinister
glamour of radioactive devices - scattering deadly
radiological waste in the City of London or across
midtown Manhattan - has tended to overshadow the
far greater likelihood that bomb makers will
initially be attracted to the cheapness and ease
of combining explosives with any number of
ordinary industrial caustics and toxins.
As if to emphasize that poison-gas
explosions are now part of their standard arsenal,
sectarian bombers - identified, as usual, by the
US military as members of "al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia" - unleashed three successive chlorine
suicide-bomb attacks on March 16 against Sunni
towns outside Fallujah. The two largest attacks
involved dump trucks loaded with 750-liter
chlorine tanks. Aside from the dozens wounded or
killed by the direct explosions, at least another
350 people were stricken by the yellow-green
clouds of chlorine.
As in April 1915, with
the first uses of chlorine gas on the Western
Front in World War I, these explosions sowed
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