Attacks target buses in Iraq

Attacks target buses in Iraq

BAGHDAD (AP) — Insurgents targeted passenger buses north of Baghdad on Tuesday, as a suicide bomber killed at least eight people west of Mosul and gunmen seized 21 men traveling through Diyala province.

The latest bloodshed highlighted the slow-going, punch-counterpunch U.S.-led campaign against al-Qaida in Iraq, more than a month after Iraq’s prime minister said he expected the fight for Mosul would be a “decisive battle.”

The Americans view the northern campaign as a chance to subdue al-Qaida in Iraq in areas surrounding Mosul, a major transportation hub that the military has described as the terror group’s last urban stronghold.

Tuesday’s bombing, 40 miles west of Mosul, struck a bus heading from that city to the Syrian capital of Damascus.

Al-Qaida is believed to use the cover of sprawling sheep and produce markets in Mosul to smuggle foreign fighters, weapons and cash from Syria. Mosul, the country’s third-largest city, lies some 80 miles east of the Syrian border and 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Farther north, Turkish officials said Tuesday that their troops pressed an incursion deeper into Iraq, as they chased separatist Kurdish rebels as much as 12 miles across that border. Fed-up Iraqi leaders demanded that Turkey end the military operation, and the regional parliament in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish area unanimously approved a measure authorizing its military forces to fight back if attacked by Turks.

The south, however, was relatively calm. There, millions of black-clad pilgrims clogged the streets of Karbala for the peak of an annual religious commemoration for a revered Shiite figure. A nationwide pilgrimage to the city was marred by attacks earlier in the week that killed at least 63 people.

Violence has rattled much of the northern region in recent days.

The U.S. military said it killed seven al-Qaida in Iraq members and captured three insurgents during a firefight Monday east of the town of Khan Bani Saad, near the Diyala provincial capital of Baqouba. Three soldiers were wounded, it said.

Elsewhere in Diyala, police said gunmen in civilian clothes stopped two buses at a fake checkpoint on a highway in the Adeim area, 45 miles north of Baqouba, then took the buses and kidnapped 21 men. They later released three women, said an officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to release the information.

Police said the gunmen seized the buses while they were heading south to Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, from the city of Kirkuk.