By Edward Wong
The New York Times, 07 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 6 - Powerful explosions from two suicide bombs ripped through the capital's main police academy on Tuesday, killing at least 36 police officers and wounding 72 other people, including an American contractor, according to an Interior Ministry official and the American military.
The blasts sent police officers fleeing across the compound. Officers in bloody, tattered blue uniforms were carried into nearby hospital wards, some of them wailing, their faces streaked with tears. American soldiers piled out of Humvees and helped to seal off the inner courtyard, where the explosions had scattered body parts of trainees.
"They were all like brothers, they were all young," said Hassan Dawood, 32, a teacher at the academy, who was sobbing while lying on a marble bench in a hallway of Al Kindi Hospital, his head in the lap of a colleague. "I just want to ask, 'Is this jihad? Is this jihad against Iraqis?' I want to ask the mujahedeen, 'Do you slaughter your brother in the name of jihad?' "
The attack was the deadliest in Baghdad in months. It underscores the continuing vulnerability of the Iraqi forces, even in the capital, as President Bush is under increasing political pressure in the United States to start bringing home some of the 160,000 American troops here.
Last week, the president acknowledged some past difficulties in training the Iraqi police and military forces, but cited advances in the effort to shift to them the burden of fighting the war against the insurgents.
Striking at the very heart of the nascent Iraqi police, inside their main academy in eastern Baghdad, the attack showed that the insurgents have infiltrated the deepest levels of the Iraqi forces, a danger that has bedeviled the American enterprise from the start. Hundreds of police officers and potential recruits have been killed in the war, many in suicide bombings at recruitment centers across the country.
The explosions took place as Saddam Hussein's trial continued in the capital. On Tuesday, the ousted dictator ferociously lambasted the court to try to reassert his authority and bolster insurgent morale. [Page A26.]
With the trial under way and the Dec. 15 elections for a full, four-year government approaching, American generals said they expected the violence to increase.
Jihadist groups have warned Iraqis against taking any part in the political process, although a prominent group of Sunni clerics, the Muslim Scholars Association, announced Tuesday that it would not call for a boycott of the election, as it had last January.
Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite network, broadcast a videotape from a militant group showing what appeared to be a captured American security consultant, the latest victim in a wave of abductions of Westerners. The videotape, which bore the logo of the Islamic Army in Iraq, a group led by former Baath Party members, showed the hostage, a blond man, sitting in jeans and a dark jacket with his hands tied behind his back.
It also showed close-ups of an identification card and the man's passport, which had the name of Ronald Alan Schulz, 40, of North Dakota. The captors said they would kill Mr. Schulz in 72 hours unless all detainees in Iraq were released and residents of Anbar Province, the heart of the insurgency, were compensated for their losses.
The bombers at the police academy, each armed with explosive vests, made their way into the compound despite what some police officers described as meticulous searches at the entrances. They demonstrated an unerring knowledge of the layout of the compound and the procedures inside.
After the first bomb detonated at about 12:45 p.m. in the courtyard, right outside a classroom, the second exploded inside a shelter into which many of the officers had fled, witnesses said.
"We had smoked a few cigarettes and were heading into a restaurant when we heard a roaring sound that shook the earth beneath us," said Omar Chasib Fahad, 20, a thin, pale cadet wrapped in a light-brown blanket on a hospital bed. "I and many other cadets ran into a nearby shelter. A few minutes later, another big explosion took place that cracked and destroyed part of the ceiling."
A police trainer said there were 838 cadets enrolled at the academy.
"At each checkpoint, there is a thorough search," the trainer, Ali Qasim, 26, said as he stood in a hospital ward in a bloody undershirt. "Every man has to raise up his shirt to show there are no explosive belts, and it's the same for women. There are women searching women."
The identity of the wounded American contractor was not released by the military.
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for the attack in an Internet posting, according to the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist messages.
Al Qaeda said the bombers had struck after observing the academy several times, and had chosen a moment when it appeared that more than 150 officers and cadets were there. The group said the attack had been aimed at officers recruited from the ranks of the Badr Organization, an Iranian-trained Shiite militia that answers to one of the country's ruling parties.
The Islamic Army in Iraq, the same group that is apparently holding Mr. Schulz, also posted an Internet message taking credit for the attack, saying it had set off a car bomb at the academy, though no such bomb had been actually detonated.
The Islamic Army's demand for the release of detainees in exchange for Mr. Schulz is the same made by another group that is holding four Christian aid workers. The surge in abductions has raised fears that jihadists may once again start beheading Western captives and releasing videos of the killings, as they did in the fall of 2004.
The Marines issued a statement on Tuesday correcting an report it had made about the circumstances of a homemade bomb explosion outside Falluja that killed 10 marines and injured 11 others on Dec. 1. Marine officials said that the explosion took place not during a foot patrol as first reported, but rather in an abandoned flour factory being used as a patrol base.
A Marine company commander had been visiting the factory to conduct a promotion ceremony for three marines, and it appears that a marine may have stepped on a hidden pressure plate when the ceremony ended, setting off the explosion. Explosives experts believe that insurgents had buried four artillery shells in two separate locations, the Marines said.
Those Westerners currently held by various groups include Bernard Planche, a French engineer abducted in Baghdad on Monday morning; Susanne Osthoff, a German archaeologist taken on Nov. 25; and the four Christian aid workers - an American, a Briton and two Canadians - kidnapped the same weekend.
More than 200 foreigners, many of them from Arab nations, have been abducted since the American invasion in spring 2003. At least 50 have been killed, some in beheadings, and about 20 are still missing. Over the summer, insurgents began a campaign to attack and abduct Muslim diplomats in order to force the diplomats' home countries to sever ties to the Iraqi government.
At the White House, President Bush told reporters on Tuesday that the United States would not pay any ransom. "What we will do, of course, is use our intelligence-gathering to see if we can't help locate them," the president said.
Violence erupted in other provinces as well on Tuesday. Police officials in the oil city of Kirkuk said four important Iraqi engineers had been attacked as they drove between Kirkuk and Tikrit, the hometown of Mr. Hussein, in the northern Sunni triangle. Salma Mari, in charge of the planning department in Tikrit, and a colleague were killed, while Tahsin Wali, the head of the municipality's accounts, was abducted, the police said. The fourth man was seriously injured.
A hospital in the town of Musayyib, south of Baghdad, received nine bodies of government workers on Tuesday, a hospital official said. Eight of them had been killed a few days ago, and the ninth killed more recently, the official said. All had been shot in the head.
Musayyib lies in an area rife with insurgents that is known as the Triangle of Death and was the scene of a suicide car bombing last month that killed dozens.
Police officials in the town of Rutbah, in western Iraq, found 11 dead civilians who had apparently been executed, said Khalaf Abdullah Zaidan, a resident of Falluja with ties to the police in Rutbah. The victims had been killed at least three days earlier, and they were found with their hands and feet tied or handcuffed, he said.
The American military said Tuesday that a soldier was killed in a roadside bomb explosion in Baghdad on Sunday.
In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade on Tuesday evening at the local office of Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, who is a candidate in the coming elections. No one was injured.
The attack came after a crowd of young men, believed to be loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, a rebellious cleric, threw stones and shoes at Mr. Allawi on Sunday when he went inside the revered Shrine of Ali. He had made the visit without knowing it was the anniversary of the death of Mr. Sadr's father, who was killed by Saddam Hussein in 1999. Mr. Allawi is despised by Sadr followers because he and the Americans killed hundreds of people in Najaf during the suppression of a Sadr-led uprising in August 2004.
Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Kirkuk and Falluja.
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Citation: Edward Wong. "Suicide Bombers Kill 36 Officers at Iraqi Academy," The New York Times, 07 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/international/middleeast/07iraq.html
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