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AFP Photo
A US soldier stands guard as Blackhawk helicopter lands at a field in the holy city of Karbala during a handover ceremony. At least 20 decapited corpses were found and a suicide bomber killed 28 policemen northeast of Baghdad on Monday, as the US military transferred the security control of Karbala to Iraqi forces.
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BAGHDAD (AFP) - At least 20 decapited corpses were found and a suicide bomber killed 28 policemen northeast of Baghdad on Monday, as the US military transferred the security control of Karbala to Iraqi forces.
The corpses of men killed recently were found near the village of Gsrine close to Baquba, just hours after a bicycle bomber slaughtered 28 policemen in the violent city, a security official said.
The discovery of bodies was a stark reminder that Iraq's brutal sectarian strife was far from over despite wideranging US and Iraqi military operations, including in the Diyala province of which Baquba is the capital.
Baquba is one of the most dangerous regions in Iraq, where security forces are waging a campaign targeting insurgents, especially Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Earlier on Monday a suicide bomber riding a bicycle blew himself up at the police headquarters in Baquba. Brigadier General Kudair al-Timimi of Baquba police said the blast killed 28 police and wounded another 21 people, nearly all of them police.
The US military, meanwhile, handed back control of the Shiite province of Karbala to Iraqi forces, making the province only the eighth of Iraq's 18 provinces to be returned by the coalition.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who addressed the Karbala handover ceremony, accused his own military leaders of slow progress in taking back control of the provinces. "Allow me to say that we are late, very late, to reconstruct, to rebuild our forces for reasons that I do not want to mention here," said Maliki who is under pressure from Washington to speed up the process.
The delay in rebuilding Iraqi forces has hampered US plans to withdraw its forces from the country. "We demand that the military and police leadership make more efforts to reconstruct and rebuild the security forces in order to take over control of the rest of the provinces," Maliki said.
Washington and Baghdad had hoped that Iraqi forces would take control of most of the provinces this year, and had even declared 2007 the "Year of Security" in Iraq.
But a US congressional report in September said Iraq was 12-18 months away from assuming complete security control, largely because of a corrupt police force.
The report by General James Jones, the former top US commander in Europe, said Iraqi forces were improving "but not at a rate sufficient to meet their essential security responsibilities."
Washington's top officials in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus, said the handover of Karbala was a "positive step towards Iraq's self-reliance." Karbala, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Baghdad, is relatively peaceful compared to some other central and western regions of Iraq, but is emerging as a flashpoint of Shiite rivalry. Home to the shrines of two of Shiite Islam's most revered imams -- Hussein and Abbas --, the city of Karbala was the site of a bloody firefight in August during a major religious festival in which at least 52 people were killed.
The other Iraqi provinces handed over by US-led forces to date are Maysan, Muthanna, Dhi Qar and Najaf in the central and southern regions and the three northern Kurdish provinces of Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyah. Maliki on Monday said Iraqi forces would take over the southern province of Basra, currently under the control of around 5,200 British troops, in mid-December.
Iraqi forces rescued on Monday eight of the 11 tribal leaders who were kidnapped on Sunday in northern Baghdad's Al-Shaab neighbourhood. They were freed after a gunbattle with their captors. "We have rescued eight of the hostages and are working to free the others. We killed four of the kidnappers," defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari told AFP.
The US military said the group of Shiite and Sunni tribal chiefs were kidnapped by Arkan Hasnawi, a rogue militant who had broken away from radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. On Sunday, a security official said the 11 tribal leaders were from a local movement in Diyala opposing Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In recent months the US military has been supported by tribal leaders and by nationalist former insurgents in its fight against Al-Qaeda in Iraq. A top fighter of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Tiba al-Karbuli, was killed Monday after clashes with police in the western province of Anbar along with his two aides, police said, adding he was an Afghan national. Four members of a family were killed in car bomb explosion near their house in the northern town of Baiji, police said.
© AFP 2010
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