By Gideon Long
Reuters, 11 January 2006
BAGHDAD - As the past week has shown, death tolls in suicide bombings are appallingly high in Iraq -- generally much higher than elsewhere in the world.
Analysts say this is because Iraqi security checks are still sporadic despite U.S. training, policemen are often ill-equipped and ill-disciplined, public gatherings tend to be large and chaotic, and high-grade explosives are readily available.
"Security just isn't good enough to cope in Iraq," said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi consultant with the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "Until it improves, we'll keep on seeing these very high death tolls from suicide bombings."
Only last week, two bombers struck in the cities of Kerbala and Ramadi. Both were alone and on foot, but they still managed to kill 120 people between them and injure around 200.
By contrast, no suicide bomber in Israel has managed to kill more than six people in a single blast for well over a year.
Iraq's vulnerability to such attacks was exposed again on Monday when two bombers dressed as senior police officers walked through the main checkpoint of the Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad and killed 28 people.
With the U.S. ambassador at a nearby police ceremony, security should have been solid, but al Qaeda, which claimed responsibility, said the bombers evaded nine checkpoints.
They also got hold of high-level security passes that enabled them to get inside the compound and would have admitted them to the ministry building itself.
It is hard to imagine such a security breach in Israel.
"The system here for going after these groups is much more effective than in Iraq," said Assaf Heffetz, a former Israeli police chief and counter-terrorism expert. "Public safety measures are also not as good there, for example at shopping centres. That is what makes the difference."
EASY PREY
The target of last week's Ramadi bomb was a line of around 1,000 men queuing for jobs at a police recruiting station.
Western security experts say they are amazed police even considered gathering so many obvious targets together in one place, particularly in a city as dangerous as Ramadi.
They said recruitment should have been staggered over several days to keep crowd numbers down, and those wanting to join the queue should have been filtered through a checkpoint and searched one by one.
The conduct of Iraqi police and soldiers at checkpoints has also been criticised. They sometimes stand together chatting -- easy prey for a bomber on foot or in a car -- rather than remaining spaced out as is standard military practice.
Many are given only rudimentary training before being sent on to the world's most dangerous streets, sometimes without the helmets and body armour which might save them.
Even when they are protected, there are simply not enough of them to stop the onslaught of bombers.
Al Qaeda boasted this week that insurgents had carried out about 800 suicide attacks in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a relentless rate of nearly one a day.
BIGGER BOMBS
Jeremy Binnie, analyst with Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre in London, said he suspects the bombs used in Iraq are also more powerful than elsewhere -- a legacy of the Saddam era when the country was flooded with munitions.
"A suicide bomber on foot can only carry around 20 kg (44 lbs) of explosive, wherever he is in the world," Binnie said.
"A lot of bomb makers will use only a small amount of rapid detonative explosive as a charge, with the rest of the bomb made of ammonium nitrate and shrapnel. But in Iraq it often appears they use more military-grade ordnance."
Iraqi medical response teams are not as good as they are in Israel, where they have much more experience in dealing with bomb victims. As a result, many of those maimed in Iraqi blasts die later from their injuries.
While analysts say the U.S. and Iraqi authorities can do more to bring death tolls down, for example by redesigning checkpoints and using random stop-and-search techniques, a change of attitude is needed from ordinary Iraqis too.
That could be difficult.
When suicide bombers struck in Kerbala during the Shi'ite festival of Ashura in March 2003, they killed over 90 people, but that did not prevent hundreds of thousands of pilgrims returning the following year to pack the city's streets, markets and shrines, despite the obvious risks.
Yet such is the underlying fear in crowded places of suicide attacks that it was not a bomb but the mere rumour of a bomber that caused Iraq's biggest postwar death toll -- over 1,000 were crushed or drowned when frightened pilgrims stampeded on a bridge over the Tigris river in Baghdad in August.
Additional reporting by Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem
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Citation: Gideon Long. "Iraq still a soft target for suicide bombers," Reuters, 11 January 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LON927794.htm
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