Iraqi violence takes another 30 lives

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The surge of violence that has swept Iraq since its first elected government took office nearly a month ago continued on Saturday, with at least 30 new deaths reported across the country, some of them in what appeared to be sectarian killings.

The latest attacks raised the total number of Iraqis killed this month to about 650, in addition to at least 63 American troops who have been killed, the highest American toll since January.

In two of the worst incidents reported Saturday, three suicide bombers tried to blast into a base shared by American and Iraqi troops at Sinjar, 40 miles from the northwestern border with Syria, killing at least one Iraqi border policeman and wounding at least 18 others, including 15 civilians.

Farther south along the Syrian border, in the Sunni Arab city of Qaim, a police commander confirmed the killing in recent days of 10 Shiite pilgrims returning from a shrine in Syria, The Associated Press reported.

According to officers with the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry, which oversees the area west of Mosul, the attack at Sinjar began at 8:20 a.m., when an Opel sedan approached the base at high speed, and Iraqi forces shot the driver. As the car exploded, a second suicide bomber raced forward in a truck, came under Iraqi fire and detonated. A third vehicle then tried to ram a walk-through gate, the officers said, but the driver detonated under fire.

In other attacks, two Sunni Arab tribal leaders, one in Baghdad and the other in the northern city of Kirkuk, were killed on Friday, according to police reports. In the Kirkuk killing, local officials suggested that the victim, Sheik Sabhan Khalaf al-Jibouri, might have been a target because of his attempt to have friendly relations with Kurdish leaders.

Kirkuk has been a hotbed of rivalry between Sunni Arabs and Kurds driven from the city in an "Arabization" program pursued by Saddam Hussein.

Just weeks into its tenure, the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has been shaken by the level of violence, which has soared to levels not seen since before the elections in January. The government has announced a major security crackdown in Baghdad, which aides said they expect to begin on Sunday, with up to 40,000 Iraqi troops deployed and 600 checkpoints set up in an attempt to sweep up suicide-bombing cells and other insurgents.

Al-Jaafari, 57, heads an administration dominated by two Shiite religious parties, a watershed for a country ruled for generations by the Sunni Arab minority. Meeting reporters this week, he acknowledged that he was particularly alarmed by reports that Shiite death squads have been singling out Sunni Arabs as targets, including clerics and tribal leaders, in revenge for the persecution of Shiites under Saddam and attacks in the past two years by Sunni Arab insurgents.

Many of the deaths reported on Saturday resulted from insurgent attacks on Iraqi security targets, a trend in the war that has gained pace with the buildup of the new American-trained army, police and border forces. Those forces now have a total of about 165,000 men trained and equipped out of a planned combined force of 270,000 by the summer of 2006. The Pentagon said this week that there were 139,000 American troops in Iraq, down about 11,000 from the number at the time of the January voting.

In three attacks on Friday that were not reported by the authorities in Baghdad until Saturday, at least 11 civilians were killed. An attack on a police patrol in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, killed three people, the police said, and eight others were reported to have died from insurgent attacks in a region about 25 miles south of Baghdad.

But the most violent incident appeared to have been the killing of the Shiite pilgrims at Qaim. The Associated Press quoted a local police commander, Brig. Abdul Wahab al-Adily, as saying that 10 bodies had been found here, and that relatives of the dead had told the authorities that the victims were returning from a visit to the Sayda Zeinab shrine in Damascus when they were attacked at a border crossing.

For the American forces, the focus remained on Marine operations at Haditha, 145 miles northwest of Baghdad on the main road to Syria. Marine commanders have said that the 1,000-member force of American and Iraqi troops that began raids and patrols in the city five days ago was following up on a previous offensive at Qaim earlier in the month. That operation aimed to disrupt the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Islamic militant who is America's most- wanted man in Iraq, but it was called off after many of the militants fled across the border into Syria or back toward Haditha.

A Marine statement on Saturday said the Haditha operation had killed 14 insurgents and captured 30 others "suspected of terrorist activity." In addition, it said, Marines had discovered four machine guns hidden in a neighborhood school, as well as caches of weapons and ammunition elsewhere in the city. On Thursday, the statement said, Marines called in a bombing strike on a building occupied by insurgents. "One laser-guided bomb was dropped on the building, leveling it to rubble and killing the terrorists inside," it said.

The brother of a Japanese security contractor taken hostage in Iraq three weeks ago was reported to have confirmed that a body shown in an insurgent video was that of the missing man. The contractor, Akikhiko Saito, 44, who worked for a British-owned security company, was captured after a firefight with insurgents near the American air base at Asad, about 50 miles north of Ramadi.

"I have confirmed that it was my brother by watching the video on my personal computer," said Hironobu Saito, 34, according to an Agence France-Presse report. But Prime Minister Junichro Koizumi of Japan urged caution. "We have yet to verify the identity," he said.

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