Insurgents kill at least 23 Iraqis in new day of attacks

Insurgent fighters killed at least 23 Iraqis, most of them police officers, in a wave of bombings across the country on Friday, after US generals warned the country could slip into civil war.

While much attention was focused on Baghdad, where hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite activists marched in support of Lebanon's Hezbollah militia, the worst of the violence erupted well beyond the capital in the far north.

The northern city of Mosul woke to a dawn blitz of six bombs and a hail of mortars, which killed at least nine police officers and triggered a six-hour gunbattle in which an unknown number of insurgents were killed.

Nineveh Province's police chief, Major General Wathiq al-Hamdani, blamed fighters inspired by the Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden for the attack.

"These are members of al-Qaeda that we clashed with. We killed large numbers of them and we burned their trucks and vehicles. We are in full control of the situation. The people of Mosul were very helpful," he told state television.

Mosul, 370 kilometres from Baghdad, has a majority Sunni Arab population and significant Turkmen and Kurdish ethnic minorities. It is often the scene of violent attacks on security forces.

"The situation is still volatile, and clashes are continuing in parts of the city," said a senior officer from Mosul, adding that a vehicle curfew had been imposed from 10 am (0600 GMT) on Friday until 6 am on Saturday.

Farther south in Nineveh, in the town of Al-Hadrah, a suicide bomber ploughed an explosives-laden car into a group of police protecting a football match, killing three officers and seven civilians, police said.

In the early hours of the morning, a roadside bomb killed a pregnant Iraqi woman and her husband as they raced to hospital to deliver her child.

Police said the couple were taking a taxi at 2 am (2200 GMT Thursday) from the village of Huweidar towards the maternity hospital in Diyala provincial capital Baquba, north of Baghdad. The cab driver and the man's sister-in-law were injured in the blast.

Meanwhile, a former member of one of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's security services was shot dead in the southern city of Amara, police said.

And, a short distance south of Baghdad, a bystander was killed in a botched attempt to target a police patrol with a roadside bomb.

The killings came a day after the top US commander for the Middle East, General John Abizaid, told US lawmakers that Iraq could slide into civil war, three years after a US-led invasion overthrew Saddam's regime.

Source: China Daily