Suicide bomber kills 23 at Baghdad diner

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber who walked into a Baghdad restaurant popular with police outside the Green Zone government compound killed 23 people on Sunday, the bloodiest attack in the capital for six weeks.

The al Qaeda group in Iraq led by Jordanian Abu Musab al- Zarqawi claimed the bombing as US and Iraqi troops scoured towns close to the Syrian border that they believe serve as staging posts for foreign fighters coming into the country.

The bomb went off around lunchtime just a few hundred metres from where Iraq's parliament was meeting inside the fortified Green Zone, once Saddam Hussein's presidential palace compound. Zarqawi and his Iraqi Sunni Arab allies have declared war on the new Shi'ite-led, U.S.-backed government.

Though US commanders say foreigners like Zarqawi account for only a small number of insurgents, they say they are behind the bloodiest attacks and blame Zarqawi for a surge in violence since the government took office in April.

Since then more than 1,000 Iraqis and some 120 US troops have been killed. But not for more than a month, since US and Iraqi forces launched Operation Lightning, a crackdown on insurgent bomb factories and other rebel activity in the city, has an attack caused so much bloodshed in central Baghdad.

The one-room, street-front restaurant was devastated, with scarcely a stick of blood-spattered furniture intact. Human remains lay on the sidewalk. Police said seven of the 23 dead were police, as were 16 of the 36 people were wounded.

"Ibn Zanbour", or "Son of the Wasp", was a lively and popular halt for police and others on a strip of grill and kebab establishments along a shaded sidewalk. It lies within an outer cordon of police checkpoints set up after a series of car bombings of entrances to the Green Zone six months ago.

ZARQAWI BLAMED

US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Clifford Kent said the attack fitted a pattern of attacks on police - a suicide car bomb attack killed five people elsewhere in Baghdad - and said overall violence had been reduced in the city.

"I don't think this is a setback," he said. "We know that they're still capable of carrying out attacks and we will continue to put pressure on them throughout the city."

In the deserted town of Karabila, once home to 60,000 people, and other areas around the city of Qaim near the Syrian border, US forces continued Operation Spear, one of two offensives launched in three days in the western desert.

Along with Operation Dagger, closer to the capital near Tharthar lake, the high-profile assaults took place as US President George W. Bush, absorbing new criticism of his strategy in Iraq, asked Americans to show patience on Saturday over what he called a "central front in the war on terror".

US aircraft and helicopters were in action overnight. The US military said Britain's air force has also taken part.

Troops found what they called a car bomb factory, Iraqi hostages and a torture house for captives on Saturday.

Reporters invited to accompany the US forces reported little sign of civilian life.

"Nobody's been home. We've run into probably four families since we got here," Captain Chris Toland said as his company paused on Sunday in a house close to a mosque where marines killed three gunmen the day before.

Outside lay the scattered remains of one fighter; after he died, troops set off grenades he had strapped to his body.

FOREIGN PASSPORTS

Marines said on Saturday about 50 insurgents had been killed and 10 civilians whose homes guerrillas had fired from were wounded. A marine was shot dead on Saturday in Karabila, the military said in a statement.

At least 1,719 US troops have died in 27 months in Iraq.

Iraqi troops found nine passports along with a cache of grenades. The documents belonged to Saudis, Sudanese and North Africans, including a Libyan in whose passport was a boarding pass indicating he flew to Damascus from Tripoli two weeks ago.

A leading organisation for Iraq's Sunni Arabs, the minority once dominant under Saddam, accused US forces of killing women and children and destroying homes, schools and other civilian buildings around Karabila and Qaim.

"Operation Spear ... will break on the rock of Iraqi solidarity," the Muslim Clerics Association said in a statement reflecting anger at US military tactics.

The chief doctor at the area's main hospital in Qaim, Hamdi al-Alusi, said he had seen 10 bodies and treated 17 wounded. Most of those hurt were women and children, he said.

Three people died and seven were wounded when gunmen opened fire at a market in Iskandariya, just south of the capital.

Near Tikrit, Saddam's home town, a suicide bomber killed three Iraqi soldiers and wounded nine on Sunday, police said.

Several aides to Saddam, including his cousin "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid were questioned by the Tribunal preparing to try the former president and his associates, officials said.

- REUTERS