Three suicide bombers exploded trucks loaded with explosives and tanks of chlorine gas in Iraq’s Anbar province March 16, killing at least two Iraqi police and sickening more than 350 people. In the first attack, a pick-up truck carrying chlorine blew up near a checkpoint northeast of Ramadi, the provincial capital, wounding a US soldier and an Iraqi civilian. In the second, a dump truck filled with chlorine exploded outside the town of Amiriya, south of Fallujah, killing two police officers. Local police and hospital officials said that as many as eight people were killed in the attacks. The perpetrators were said to be Sunni militants, even though the chlorine attacks came in an overwhelmingly Sunni region. The New York Times writes March 18: “Some local officials blamed militants linked to the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for the attacks Friday and said they were part of a campaign to intimidate moderate tribes that have declared their opposition to such fundamentalist insurgent groups.” Could be. But the article also states that on March 17 a bomb partly destroyed a Sunni mosque in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood. Was this also the work of Sunni extremists—or of Shi’ite militants? The Times does not venture to speculate…
See our last posts on Iraq and the sectarian cleansing.
