IRAQ: Two Iraqi government officials were shot in Baghdad yesterday, one day after a suicide bomber killed 30 people after luring them to a truck bomb disguised as a date vendor's van.
In the latest of almost daily shootings in Baghdad, many of them targeting government officials, a cabinet adviser was killed when his car was attacked by gunmen and a deputy trade minister was wounded in a separate attack.
The Pentagon estimates 26,000 Iraqis have been killed or wounded in attacks by insurgents since January 2004, with the daily number increasing fairly steadily.
In the first partial public count of Iraqi casualties, the Pentagon said more than 60 are killed or wounded by insurgents every day. The figures exclude Iraqis killed or wounded by US forces, for which the Pentagon says it does not release data.
In Saturday's attack, the bomber parked a truck laden with dates in the centre of the small Shia town of Howaider and gathered a crowd before he detonated a huge charge, police said.
Among the dead were merchants breaking the daily Ramadan fast at sunset in their shops around the marketplace and people out enjoying the festive atmosphere of dusk in the holy month.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the targeting of Shia Muslim civilians bore the marks of hardline Sunni Islamist militants like al-Qaeda in Iraq and recalled an attack six weeks ago in Baghdad when a bomber lured a crowd of Shia day labourers seeking work and killed more than 100.
Howaider, 8km north of the provincial capital of Baquba and some 70km north of Baghdad, sits on the bank of the Diyala river and is renowned locally for the produce of the date palm groves that surround it.
Diyala province has a broad sectarian mix of Sunnis and Shias and has seen violence by insurgents opposed to the Shia-led, US-backed government.
US commanders in the province describe it as a "little Iraq" because of its mixed population, and campaigning there for a December 15th election is likely to be among the hardest fought in the country, with local tensions mirroring broader divisions.
In Baghdad, Ghalib Abdul Mehdi, a brother of prominent Shia politician and vice president Adel Abdul Mehdi, was killed with his driver in an attack claimed by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In a separate incident, police said deputy trade minister Qais Dawoud Hassan was wounded in the shoulder when his motorcade was ambushed by gunmen, killing two bodyguards.
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a German magazine interview published yesterday that US forces were making inroads on the insurgency, although he warned attacks might rise in the run-up to December's parliamentary elections.
The blast in Howaider came a day after a deadline for parties to register for elections that Washington hopes will set Iraq firmly on the path to peace and democracy, 2½ years after the US-led invasion toppled Saddam.
It also comes at the end of a week that saw the 2,000th US military death in Iraq.
Recent weeks have seen a relative lull in violence, despite an October 15th referendum on a new, US-backed constitution and the start of Saddam's trial.
Iraqi authorities and US commanders attribute the drop to a crackdown on insurgents. Individuals claiming to speak for some Sunni nationalist rebel groups have, however, said they held back to encourage Sunnis to turn out and vote No.
A Pentagon report to Congress said casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces rose from about 26 a day between January 1st and March 31st, 2004, to about 64 a day between August 29th and September 16th, 2005, just before the constitutional referendum.
The US has not provided such a comprehensive estimate of the Iraqi casualty toll from insurgent attacks before.