Al Qaeda-Linked Group Says It Killed 9 Soldiers in Iraq

Al Qaeda-Linked Group Says It Killed 9 Soldiers in Iraq


By EDWARD WONG
Published: April 25, 2007

BAGHDAD, April 24 — An insurgent umbrella group that includes Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia claimed responsibility today for a suicide bombing that killed nine American soldiers on Monday and wounded at least 20, one of the deadliest attacks against American forces in more than four years of war.

The soldiers were members of the Fifth Squadron, 73rd Cavalry of the Third Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, military officials said. The squadron has been involved in a security push to tamp down on booming insurgent activity in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad.

In two Internet postings, the Islamic State of Iraq, the insurgent umbrella group, boasted of carrying out the attack. It said two suicide truck bombers drove into an American base in the area of Al Waqf, according to a translation by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist postings. The details of the attack could not be independently confirmed.

Early today, the American military issued a statement saying that the bombing had hit a small outpost. In recent weeks, the Fifth Squadron had been conducting operations in downtrodden villages northeast of Baquba, the provincial capital.

The Islamic State recently announced the creation of a “cabinet” within its group, and it said today that the Ministry of War, led by Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, had planned the attack.

“Let the enemy expect more from the ministry, with power and might from the glorified Allah,” the group said. “The suicide brigades are continually increasing, and so are the ‘intruding brigades.’ ”

The membership of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is made up mostly of Iraqis, with some tribes in the country divided in their loyalties toward the group. Al Qaeda was once most active in Anbar Province, a Sunni Arab bastion, but appears to have shifted much of its efforts to Diyala Province, sandwiched between Iran and Baghdad. The province is a caldron of ethnic and sectarian tensions, with Sunni Arab militants driving Shiites from the provincial capital, Iraqi Army units operating under a general loyal to a Shiite militia and Kurds slowly seizing cities in the north.

Caught in that web are the Americans.

Because of intensifying violence, the American forces there have been bolstered recently by a Stryker battalion. American fatalities in Diyala have surged in recent months.

The Fifth Squadron, led by Lt. Col. Andrew Poppas, lost a lieutenant and a captain, both West Point graduates, last November when it fought with well-trained and well-disciplined insurgents for more than 40 hours in the village of Turki. The Americans had to call in more than 12 hours of air strikes, and at least 72 insurgents were reported killed.

In northern Ramadi, a suicide truck bomber killed at least nine people today and wounded at least 25, some of them policemen, a police colonel said.

In Baghdad, insurgents set off two car bombs in a parking lot opposite the Iranian Embassy, wounding four people. The Iraqi Army and the police sealed off the roads around the embassy, snarling traffic for miles.

A friend of the son of the Iraqi electricity minister was killed when a bomb exploded in the son’s locker at Baghdad University, an Interior Ministry official said. The son, Fadi Kareem Waheed, was wounded along with two other colleagues.

Two concealed bombs exploded on Palestine Street in eastern Baghdad, killing at least two people and wounding at least nine others.

Sunni insurgents blew up a Shiite mosque in the Jihad neighborhood, although no one was injured.

In the town of Jaara, south of Baghdad, gunmen killed seven members of a Shiite family, four of them children, a police official said.

At least seven Iraqis were killed in violence or discovered dead today in Diyala Province.

The American military said a Marine was killed Monday in combat in Anbar Province.

Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Baquba and Ramadi.
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