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FALLUJA, Jan 22: Guerillas attacked an Iraqi police post with assault rifles and a grenade on Thursday, killing two policemen and a civilian, hours after a mortar attack on a US base killed three soldiers and wounded one.
The guerillas opened fire on Wednesday on a bus carrying Iraqi women home from work at a military base west of Baghdad, killing four women and wounding six. All the attacks were in the volatile "Sunni triangle" region around Baghdad.
The latest upsurge in attacks coincided with US talk of handing over power to an Iraqi administration later this year and a dispute over whether this should be done before or after elections are held.
South of the capital near Diwaniya, a Spanish police commander was shot in the head and seriously wounded during a joint operation with Iraqi police against "members of a terrorist group".
Police near Falluja, a hotbed of resistance 50kms west of Baghdad, said guerillas in a passing car lobbed a grenade and opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles at a checkpoint on the highway towards the restive town of Ramadi.
"There was nothing we could do. There was a bunch of men with checkered headdresses who fired from the back of a pickup truck," said policeman Hashim Tawfik as he lay in a hospital bed, still wearing his blood-stained shirt. "All I could do was jump behind a dirt mound on the side of the highway and wait."
Two policemen and a civilian were killed in the attack, and five police were wounded. A pool of blood lay on the side of the highway, along with a police vehicle pockmarked by bullets.
"Last evening, we had a mortar attack on a forward operating base near Baquba which killed two soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division and critically wounded another,"an official said, adding that rockets were also used in the attack, .
FOUR WOMEN KILLED: Police and hospital officials in Falluja said unknown men had attacked a bus carrying women home from work at a US base near Habbaniya on Wednesday.
Police said the Iraqi women were Christians who lived in Baghdad and were taken every day by minibus to the base west of the capital, where they worked as cleaners and cooks. Buses carrying the women had been shot at before, they said.
Spain's defence ministry said the wounded civil guard police commander, Gonzalo Perez Garcia, was head of security for a Spanish military brigade in Iraq. US military officials in Baghdad said he was in critical condition. On Thursday, rocket-propelled grenades were fired at an office of the Iraqi Communist Party in Baghdad, killing two.
DISCORD: Facing a mounting death toll and spiralling financial costs of occupation, Washington wants to hand back sovereignty to an Iraqi government by July 1, some four months before the US presidential election.
But the US plan has been attacked by Iraq's most revered Shia leader because it does not allow for direct elections until 2005. The United Nations is considering sending a team to Iraq to investigate whether earlier elections are possible, a move Washington hopes will soothe anger over its political roadmap.-Reuters
