Rebel assault kills 23, frees prisoners
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Guerrillas overwhelmed an Iraqi police station west of Baghdad yesterday, meeting little resistance as they went from room to room shooting police. The bold, well-organized assault killed 23 people and freed dozens of prisoners, officials said.
In Muqdadiyah, 50 miles northeast of Baghdad, US soldiers fended off an attack by gunmen yesterday against their base. Ten attackers were killed, witnesses said.
The fierce daylight attack in Fallujah raised questions as to whether Iraqi police and defense forces are ready to battle insurgents, as the US military pulls back from the fight in advance of the November US presidential election.
Police in the Fallujah station said they had only small arms, with nothing larger than an automatic rifle in the face of dozens of fighters armed with heavy machine guns, hand grenades, and rocket-propelled grenades. No US forces took part in the battle.
Before the attack, the gunmen set up checkpoints and blocked the road leading to the police station, Deputy Interior Minister Ahmed Kadhum Ibrahim said in Baghdad. Residents did not notify police, he said. Nearby storeowners were warned not to open yesterday morning, one shopkeeper in Fallujah said.
The battle left 17 policemen, two civilians, and four attackers dead. At least 37 people were wounded, nearly all police. Two wounded attackers were captured, but the rest escaped.
One wounded policeman, Qais Jameel, said he heard the attackers speaking a foreign language that he speculated was Farsi. Rumors were circulating that a Shi'ite Muslim militia with ties to Iran, the Badr Brigade, was behind the attack on this Sunni town.
When US administrators hand power over to a new Iraqi government on June 30, the United States wants the police, civil defense forces, and the military to take the front line against the persistent guerrilla war.
US troops will take a lower profile, pulling out of most towns. But their continued presence in the country would probably mean that the insurgency, led by Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign Islamic fighters, will also continue its campaign of violence.
Already, guerrillas have launched bloody attacks against the Iraqi security forces. Earlier last week, back-to-back suicide bombings killed 100 Iraqis, most of them volunteers looking to join the police or military in Baghdad and a town just to the south.
About 300 Iraqi security forces have been killed since they were reestablished in May, according to the military.
The US military has been organizing the reconstruction of the Iraqi security forces. The police force has neared its planned goal of 71,000 members. The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, in charge of internal security, has about 21,000 members and is planned to reach 92,000. The army is recruiting a force of 40,000 soldiers.
In yesterday's attack, about 25 gunmen, some masked and shouting the Islamic slogan "There is no god but Allah," stormed the police station, witnesses said. At the same time, two dozen more attackers pinned down forces at a nearby compound of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps with a barrage of RPGs and gunfire to keep them from coming to the aid of police, according to the witnesses.
At the police station, attackers broke into the jail, gunned down the guards, and shot open the cell doors while others threw grenades in other rooms, said police Lieutenant Colonel Jalal Sabri. Eighty-seven prisoners escaped.
An Iraqi Civil Defense Corps officer, Daeed Hamed, said the assault could have been launched to free two Kuwaitis and a Lebanese captured earlier last week on suspicion of being insurgent fighters. Hamed was unsure whether the three foreigners had been freed.
No civil defense members were killed, a sign of how better protected their compound was than the police station, with concrete walls and sandbag blast barriers.
The same compound came under attack two days earlier by gunmen who opened fire from rooftops with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons as General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, was visiting. Abizaid was unharmed in the attack.
Police said two of the slain gunmen had Lebanese identification papers.
"I suspect [the attackers] were Arabs or Syrians or belonged to Al Qaeda," Sabri said. "They want to create instability and chaos."
With rumors of Iranian or Iraqi Shi'ite involvement spreading, some Fallujah men gathered outside the hospital and beat up two men, accusing them of belonging to the Badr Brigade, witnesses said. In Baghdad, Ibrahim, the deputy interior minister, said recent attacks are aimed at tearing apart Iraqi unity.
Also yesterday, demonstrations broke out in the northern city of Sulaymaniyah and the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, where hundreds of angry Iraqis demanded an end to US military raids and searches of their homes. Carrying placards that read "Today Demonstrations, Tomorrow Explosions," protesters gathered near a giant American-run prison, built by Hussein, and demanded the release of thousands of Iraqi prisoners.
In Kurdish-majority Sulaymaniyah, thousands of protesters clamored for an independent Kurdish state that includes the three autonomous Kurdish provinces, as well as disputed parts of northern Iraq containing a large Arab population.
