Five US Soldiers among 56 Killed in Iraq Attacks
'Pakistan Times' Foreign Desk

BAGHDAD (Iraq): At least 56 people including five US soldiers were killed and dozens others injured in fresh wave of attacks and bombing in various parts of Iraq on Monday, the media reports said.

A suicide bomber sped into a Shiite village and blew up a truck packed with explosives unleashing a massive blast that killed 30 people and pulverised mud-brick homes in northern Iraq.

The bomber detonated his deadly charge in Al-Quba after driving across farmland, flattening homes, killing 30 people and wounding dozens, the mayor of nearby town of Tal Afar, Major General Najim Abdallah said.

"It was filled with a huge amount of explosives. Twenty houses were destroyed, 10 of them entirely wiped out," said Abdallah, speaking from the town
20 kilometers (12 miles) away that scrambled the nearest emergency services.

Witnesses spoke of seeing foam to make mattresses sticking out of the truck to disguise the explosives hidden underneath, when the truck went off road and sped across farmland to the village of 7,000 inhabitants, Abdallah said.

Bodies were pulled out of the rubble of flattened homes in the village whose nearly 200 houses are built mostly from mud, and the victims ferried to hospitals as far away as the neighbouring Kurdish province of Dohuk, he said.

Bombings are increasingly common in villages, as militants flee to rural backwaters away from thousands of US and Iraqi security forces cracking down on Baghdad and other flashpoint cities under a five-month-old security plan.

Taxi driver Abu Hamid said he was chatting to his cousin in Quba when he spotted the vehicle at a distance.

"I was amazed to see a tuck moving across farmland because it would destroy the plants. The truck hit a building before blowing up. The explosion was a disaster," he said, also in a Mosul hospital.

Attacks elsewhere killed another 15 people in Iraq, including nine wiped out when a roadside bomb ripped through an unofficial stop for one of the battered minibuses used by thousands of people in Baghdad.

The device, hidden on the side of the road, blew up after a minibus stopped to collect waiting passengers in the Diyala Bridge neighbourhood in the southern suburbs, security officials said.

Shrapnel sprayed the area as Iraqis got on and off the minibus shortly before the main rush hour, and as others stood waiting for a different line.

The Al-Zafaraniyah hospital said nine people were killed, including a woman, and eight wounded were brought in with mainly burns injuries.

Iraq's brutal sectarian warfare and insurgency kills and maims daily despite the US military thrust against rogue Shiite militias and Al-Qaeda in Iraq extremists the Americans blame for most of the violence.

In the Sunni Arab heartland north of the capital, mortar rounds crashed through private homes, killing six civilians and wounding another 17 in the town of Dhuluiyah, the local police chief and hospital director said.

Police Colonel Mohammed Khaled said one woman was among the dead, with four women and five children wounded in an attack that seriously damaged five homes in the town centre.

Doctor Othman al-Juburi confirmed the casualty numbers as his medics in casualty struggled to cope with the limited supplies hampering hospitals' ability to treat patients across the country.

Two US air strikes killed eight presumed fighters in raids targeting Iraqi affiliates of Al-Qaeda, with another three killed by ground troops in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad, the military said.

Four US soldiers were killed and 12 soldiers wounded in the flashpoint city of Baquba on Monday, bringing US losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,670, according a news agency count based on Pentagon figures.

Thousands of US and Iraqi forces have been operating against Al-Qaeda linked militants since June, but senior commanders have said that most of the senior Al-Qaeda leaders in the area fled before the assault began.

Another US soldier was killed in Baghdad on Sunday, the military announced.●