Bombers kill 41 in strikes on Iraqi forces

9.30am

BAGHDAD - Bombers killed 41 people in two strikes on Iraq's fledgling security forces on Thursday, stepping up a bloody drive to sabotage plans for US-led occupation to give way to Iraqi rule on June 30.

A suicide bomber blew up his white four-wheel-drive car at an army recruiting base in Baghdad, killing 35 people and wounding 138, in Iraq's deadliest single bombing since a suicide attack on the same target killed 47 in February.

Later on Thursday a car bomb killed six paramilitary civil defence guards and wounded four near the town of Balad, north of the Iraqi capital, the US military said.

Insurgents - thought to include Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein, Iraqi nationalists and foreign Islamist militants - have attacked government officials, security forces and the oil industry in the run-up to the June 30 handover.

Oil exports, Iraq's economic lifeblood, remained paralysed on Thursday after sabotage attacks on pipelines in the north and south. But an oil official said some exports could resume on Friday after repairs to a pipeline to a Gulf terminal.

Passersby and army volunteers took the brunt of the Baghdad blast, the city's third suicide bombing this week.

Iraqis hoping to join the nascent army were waiting outside the base when hot shrapnel scythed through the air.

"Suddenly there was a huge explosion. Ten or 15 others were on top of me on the street. I can't go back. No way," said army volunteer Ibrahim Ismail from his hospital bed.

"This was a cowardly attack. It is a demonstration again that these attacks are aimed at the stability of Iraq and the Iraqi people," Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said at the scene.

Iraq's new defence minister promised a crackdown. "We will cut off their hands and behead them," Hazim al-Shaalan said. Iraqi forces would lead the raids, with only logistical help from US troops, he added.

In Washington, US President George W Bush insisted Saddam Hussein had a relationship with al Qaeda, contradicting an independent commission's report that had called into question one of his main justifications for the US war on Iraq.

Bush disputed findings from the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks that there is no evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's militant Islamist network.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," he told reporters.

"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda," he said.

The latest attacks came as an opinion poll -- the first conducted for the US-led authority since a prison abuse scandal became public -- found that 55 per cent of Iraqis would feel safer if US troops left the country now.

The level of violence in the country also means it is not possible for UN senior staff to re-establish a permanent presence to help with the political process and reconstruction, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Thursday.

A resolution adopted by the UN Security Council last week gave the world body "a leading role" in preparing for the transition to an interim government and for later elections.

The council resolution said a permanent UN presence would resume only "as circumstances permit", and Annan told reporters: "As of today, circumstances do not permit".

The US military said a third soldier had died after a rocket attack on a base north of Baghdad on Wednesday. A Hungarian soldier was killed and a Hungarian civilian driver was wounded on Thursday when an explosion hit their convoy.

Since the US-led invasion to oust Saddam last year, at least 612 US soldiers have been killed in action in Iraq.

The scandal over abuses at US-run prisons in Iraq has severely damaged Washington's image in the country.

The Pentagon acknowledged on Thursday the military had been improperly holding a suspected Iraqi "terrorist" in a prison near Baghdad for more than seven months without informing the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered military officials to hold the suspected member of the Ansar al-Islam group last November at the request of then-CIA Director George Tenet without telling the ICRC, officials said.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the United States now planned to give the ICRC access to the unidentified man.

In March, Major General Antonio Taguba, the US Army officer who investigated abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, criticised the practice of holding "ghost detainees".

Also on Thursday, suspected Iraqi insurgents released a Turkish truck driver and an Egyptian man taken hostage earlier this month, Turkey's state-run Anatolian news agency said.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq