The day's first car bomb exploded around 9:30 a.m. outside the headquarters of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's political party, the Iraqi National Accord, shortly before Allawi was to appear at a news conference detailing a slate of candidates. Allawi was not injured, but three police officers and the bomber were killed, according to a government spokesman.
"What I saw was heavy smoke and fire and policemen shooting continuously. It was as if I was in a battle," said a taxi driver who identified himself only as Sanaa.
The bomb was the second recently to target a political party; on Dec. 27, a suicide car bomber killed more than a dozen people outside the headquarters of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, another former exile party active in the interim government.
The Ansar al-Sunna Army, the group that asserted responsibility for a Dec. 21 bombing inside a US military base in Mosul, posted an Internet statement heralding "more good news. . . . Body pieces of the apostates were scattered everywhere, and their cars caught on fire. Ambulances rushed to transport dozens of injuries. Thanks and gratitude to God."
Another car bomber yesterday killed himself and four Iraqi National Guardsmen at a checkpoint in Dijail, a town north of Baghdad not far from where 22 guardsmen aboard a shuttle bus were killed on Sunday by a car bomb. The victims of yesterday's attack were members of the guard's 210th Battalion, according to Mohammed Hamza, 43, an assistant physician at the guard's medical facility.
The third car bomb was detonated around 3 p.m. by a man who pretended his sport-utility vehicle had broken down near a gate to the Green Zone, the fortified area of Baghdad that houses Iraq's interim government and the US and British embassies. The man waited for a convoy of the large, late-model SUVs that are widely known to carry Western contractors, diplomats and security personnel, then exploded his vehicle.
