Suicide bomber kills Iraq army recruits

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber has killed 12 people in a minibus transporting Iraqi army recruits, as al Qaeda said in a video on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks that US forces in Iraq were "doomed" to fail.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will fly to Tehran bearing a message to his fellow Shi'ite Islamist leaders that they should not interfere in Iraqi affairs, Maliki's spokesman said today.

Stopping short of explicitly endorsing US accusations that Iran has funded and trained militants in Iraq, spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said: "We want to pass a message to the Iranian leaders that Iraq needs good relations with neighbouring countries, without interference in our internal affairs."

Most of the dead in today's blast were recruits who had boarded a public minibus outside the Muthanna base in central Baghdad, which has been targeted in the past by insurgents from the Sunni Arab minority, including al Qaeda Islamists, who oppose the US-backed Shi'ite-led coalition government.

Recruiting centres are key to Washington's plan to withdraw troops suffering daily losses. At least 2,669 US troops have died since the 2003 invasion, which Washington said was partly a response to purported ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the war, which Washington also said it waged to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

As Americans marked the anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington, Ayman al-Zawahri, Deputy al Qaeda leader, said in remarks apparently addressed to Western leaders: "I tell them do not bother yourselves with defending your forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. These forces are doomed to failure."

Thousands of miles away from New York's Ground Zero, where hijackers crashed two airliners into the twin towers, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad told a ceremony in Baghdad that there was "no alternative to a successful Iraq". A recent Pentagon report warned that civil war is a possibility in Iraq.

Repeating Washington's view that a "stable and non-sectarian democracy" in Iraq was part of a US strategy to stamp out extremism from the Middle East, Khalilzad said:

"Any other outcome will embolden al Qaeda and extremists and produce new tragedies and the repetition of old ones like 9/11".

The Washington Post disclosed a US Marines report that officials said concluded US forces had effectively lost the vast desert province of Anbar, leaving a vacuum for al Qaeda.

With an eye on the eventual withdrawal of the 155,000 mostly US foreign troops from Iraq, the US military last week handed over formal command of Iraq's army to Maliki, who is struggling to avert a slide into all-out civil war.

Warmer ties

Iraq and Iran, both predominantly Shi'ite, fought a bloody war in the 1980s when Saddam, a Sunni, was in power. But relations are warmer since the empowerment of Iraq's long-oppressed Shi'ites, unsettling once dominant Sunnis.

Washington and other Arab states, dominated by Sunni rulers, are suspicious of non-Arab Iran's influence in Iraq, where the Islamic Republic has an "unparalleled ability to affect stability and security across most of the country", a report by the London-based Chatham House think-tank said last month.

Saying Maliki would meet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on his first official visit, the Iraqi premier's spokesman said:

"He wants to pass the message that Iraq needs stability, non-interference. If any country cannot play a positive role in Iraq they should not bring a negative."

Facing genocide charges for the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, Saddam returned on Monday to a Baghdad courtroom, where a US-based Iraqi doctor demanded compensation from foreign companies she said supplied the toppled leader with chemicals he is accused of using to gas Kurdish rebels.

Saddam used his presence in court after a three-week hiatus to intervene again in current politics, accusing his accusers of seeking to divide Kurds and Arabs and break up Iraq.

Five years after the September 11 attacks and more than three since the invasion, violence kills 100 people every day.

- REUTERS