A pledge to defeat terrorism

Al-Qaida is being blamed for a suicide attack.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Suicide bombers and militiamen fought back ferociously in the seventh week of the Baghdad security crackdown, killing at least 508 people in the past six days, but the government vowed Friday it would win the race against terrorism and despair.
As the deadly week drew to an end on the Muslim day of rest and prayer, radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr blamed the United States for the violence and called for a huge anti-American demonstration April 9, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.
Marketplaces in Baghdad, Tal Afar and Khalis stood in ruins. Clean up crews shoveled broken glass and debris into wheelbarrows in bloodstained streets. Bomb victims in wooden coffins were hoisted atop cars and vans for the trip south for burial in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
No relenting
In a sign of how deeply officials were shaken by the carnage, a top aide to Prime Minister Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Sami al-Askari, pledged that the government would not relent in efforts to curb violence.
"There is a race between the government and the terrorists who are trying to make people reach the level of despair," al-Askari said. "But the government is doing its best to defeat terrorists and it definitely will not be affected by these bombings."
The new U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, issued a statement blaming al-Qaida in Iraq for the week's first major suicide attack, a twin truck bombing that killed 80 people and wounded 185 at markets in Tal Afar in the far northwest of the country.
He said al-Qaida's leaders "once again displayed their total disregard for human life, carrying out barbaric actions against innocent Iraqi citizens in an effort to re-ignite sectarian violence and to undermine recent Iraqi and coalition successes in improving security in Baghdad."
The Pentagon ratcheted up its rhetoric against Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgents as well, condemning the recent use of chlorine gas as a weapon. It called that the first use of a poison gas against Iraqis since Saddam Hussein ordered mustard gas attacks on ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq nearly 20 years ago.
Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, a deputy operations director on the Joint Staff, said he was not implying the insurgents were following Saddam's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. But his comments recalled a key U.S. argument for invading Iraq -- Saddam's history of using chemical weapons against his own people.
Insurgents in their Anbar province stronghold have carried out or unsuccessfully launched at least eight attacks using toxic chlorine gas since Jan. 28.
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