BAGHDAD — A suspected al Qaeda suicide bomber rammed a speeding gasoline truck into an Iraqi army checkpoint outside the capital yesterday, killing at least 14 soldiers as militants hammered the country’s shaky security forces.
In southern Iraq, an apparent rocket attack at the U.S.-run Camp Bucca military prison killed at least six detainees and wounded 50, the military said.
The U.S. military oversees more than 20,000 inmates at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport.
The terror campaign against Iraqi troops and police appears designed to blunt U.S. progress in creating a stable local force so the Americans can go home. U.S. military officers began noticing the new pattern of attacks last month.
The focus on Iraqi forces was detailed to Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, which runs the nearly four-month-old security operation in Baghdad, during a recent visit to the capital’s Karradah district.
Lt. Col. Troy D. Perry, the battalion commander in the area, told Gen. Fil there was an increasing pattern of bombers allowing U.S. patrols to pass hidden roadside bombs that were then detonated a short time later as Iraqi forces drove by.
In yesterday’s attack, the suicide tank truck driver killed the 14 Iraqi soldiers near the gate of the army unit’s headquarters near Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of the capital, police said. Twenty-nine others were wounded.
Iraqi soldiers opened fire on the speeding truck but were not able to stop it until it reached the unit headquarters and the driver detonated his explosives. Witnesses said the explosion flattened the army unit’s headquarters building.
In Baghdad, a parked car bomb struck a convoy of Iraqi police commandos, killing one of them and a pedestrian and wounding seven others, and gunmen elsewhere killed one policeman and wounded another while they were on a foot patrol.
A roadside bomb that apparently targeted a police patrol in eastern Baghdad instead struck a minibus, killing at least five persons.
In Baqouba, the provincial capital of Diyala, two suicide bombers on foot blew themselves up at a police checkpoint, killing one policeman.
A total of 73 persons were killed or found dead across Iraq yesterday, 24 of the bodies dumped in Baghdad.
An American soldier was killed yesterday by small-arms fire in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, the military said.
In Baghdad, sporadic clashes erupted for nearly two hours in Amil, a dangerous neighborhood that has divided into a predominantly Sunni western half and an eastern side controlled by Shi’ite militiamen.
In Iraq’s first confirmation of Turkey’s cross-border shelling of Kurdish regions in the north of the country, the Foreign Ministry summoned the second-ranking Turkish diplomat to issue a protest and demand an end to the attacks.
Turkey has massed troops along the Iraq border and there has been scattered shelling of suspected separatist enclaves in Iraq’s Kurdish-controlled regions in the north. There were unconfirmed and conflicting reports that Turkish soldiers had crossed the border in “hot pursuit” of Kurdish rebels late last week.
Turkish politicians and members of the politically powerful military are debating whether to launch a major incursion against separatist Kurds who cross into southeastern Turkey from bases in Iraq.
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