Google news - Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- A bomb blast killed at least 25 people and injured 60 others in Baghdad's Sadr City as U.S. President George W. Bush dispatched one of his top aides to the country to assess the security situation.
The attack happened early Monday in a square crowded with workers in the impoverished Shiite Muslim area in the east of the capital, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said in a statement on its Arabic language Web site, citing unidentified Interior Ministry officials.
The U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi security forces have struggled to quell sectarian violence involving Sunni and Shiite militia and death squads. U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley made an unannounced visit to Baghdad today to meet with senior Iraqi officials and to provide Bush with a first-hand assessment of the military and political situation there, a Bush administration spokeswoman said.
Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki agreed on Oct. 28 to set up a joint U.S.-Iraqi council focused finding on ways to improve security and cooperation and speed up the transfer of responsibility to the Iraqi government. The Hadley mission comes five days after Bush said in a news conference in Washington that he was ``not satisfied'' with progress in Iraq.
Report Back
Hadley's trip gives him ``a good chance to be on the ground to assess things and be able to report back to the president,'' administration spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with Bush to a campaign event. The visit has been in the works for more than two months, Perino said. She called reports of tension between the U.S. and Iraq ``overblown.''
The U.S. is seeking a strategy to quell sectarian strife and terrorism in Iraq while turning over the brunt of fighting and security duties to the Iraqi government. The continued deployment of 140,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq amid heightened violence is an issue in the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 7 that polls suggest may cost Bush's Republican Party control over Congress.
At least 100 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq this month, 95 of those in combat, according to Defense Department figures. The latest was a U.S. Marine who died yesterday from injuries sustained during enemy action in the western al-Anbar province. The combat death toll is the highest since November 2004, when 126 died during a period that included the siege of Fallujah.
Iraqi Deaths
Many more Iraqis have died in the surge of violence and some in the country are blaming the U.S.-led coalition. Footage from the site of the Baghdad bomb aired on the Qatar-based Al- Jazeera television channel showed men clearing debris from the blood-splattered area and fire crews hosing down the ground in Sadr City.
``The responsibility for this attack lies with the occupying forces,'' Agence France-Presse cited Hamdallah Rikabi, spokesman for anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's movement, as saying. ``Deploying the occupier forces is just harming our security.''
Coalition-backed Iraqi forces arrested 13 people in a raid on Sadr City on Oct. 25 in pursuit of a militia leader. U.S. patrols have conducted searches and set up vehicle checkpoints in the area in search of a soldier missing since Oct. 23.
The missing soldier was secretly married to an Iraqi woman and was visiting her when he was kidnapped in Baghdad, the New York Times reported Monday, citing people who said they were his in-laws. It was not clear if the couple were married while the soldier was on active duty, which would be against military regulations, the Times said.
A suicide bomber killed three police officers and a child and wounded 11 other people outside a police station in Kirkuk, AFP reported. The northern town's Kurdish population supports unity with Iraq's autonomous Kurdish area, though its Arabs and Turkmen oppose such a move.
Iraqi police in the southern city of Basra, where the U.K. military is based, are investigating the murders yesterday of 17 Iraqi police trainers, a U.K. Defence Ministry spokeswoman said by telephone. The men were taken from a minibus on their way home from a British Army-run police academy in Shuaiba, AFP reported. Shuaiba, a town about 23 kilometers (14 miles) west of Basra, is the location of a British Army base.