Baghdad, April 19: SUICIDE bombers yesterday detonated two explosives-packed cars outside Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, killing at least nine people and wounding 23, officials said.
The blasts follow a visit to Baghdad by US house Speaker John Boehner, who hailed Iraq’s march toward self-governance by year’s end, praising it as “a different country” from the violent recent past.
“Just four years ago, a terrorist insurgency was killing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc across the country,” Mr Boehner, the top Republican in the House of Representatives, said in a statement issued in Washington.
“Today Iraq is a different country,” said Mr Boehner, who went to Iraq over the weekend as part of a six-member congressional delegation. “By taking the fight to al-Qa’ida, the insurgency and other terrorist threats, our men and women in uniform succeeded in providing greater security to the Iraqi population and giving the government the time to build capacity to more effectively meet the needs of the Iraqi people.”
During the visit the delegation met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, US ambassador James Jeffrey and top US military commanders. “Our first priority must be ensuring that the remaining 46,000 US forces and their civilian counterparts that are working with the government of Iraq and advising and assisting the Iraqi Security Forces have the resources and support they need to complete their mission,” Mr Boehner said.
Baghdad military spokesman Major General Qassim al-Moussawi said yesterday’s blasts appeared to be the work of bombers targeting the motorcades of two senior government officials – one from the military, the other from the cabinet – who were headed to work.
The cars blew up soon after 8am local time, in a row of vehicles waiting to be cleared into the Green Zone, which houses Iraq’s parliament and ministry offices as well as several foreign embassies.
On Sunday, as Mr Boehner made his statement, gunmen killed six people, four of them from the same family. The four family members – parents and two daughters in their 20s – were shot in the head overnight. They spared a third, seven-year-old daughter, interior ministry and security officials said.
Violence has sharply fallen in Iraq since its peak during sectarian killings of 2006 and 2007, but bombings, shootings and kidnappings remain common.
Also on Sunday, magnetic “sticky bombs” attached to cars killed two civilians and wounded another in Kirkuk, a violence-prone, religiously and ethnically diverse northern province, police said.
–Agencies