BAGHDAD, Dec 15: Twin car bombs ripped through police stations on Monday, killing nine people and wounding 17 as well as belying calculations that with Saddam Hussein behind bars the resistance might subside.

The riposte was not long in coming as near simultaneous blasts hit police posts to the west and north of the Iraqi capital.

A suicide car bomb exploded at a post north of Baghdad, killing nine people and wounding 13, three of them civilians, a police official said.

At the same time, another car bomb wounded four policemen at a special operations centre on the western edge of the capital.

In Ad Dawr, the town near Tikrit where Saddam Hussein was caught, an Iraqi Civil Defence Corps soldier was wounded on Monday in the leg by a drive-by shooting at a roadblock.

The violence had been widely expected to go on in occupied Iraq regardless of Saddam and his die-hard militants as the struggle for power hots up between rival factions and sects.

That was certainly the view of the US ground forces commander in Iraq, who also warned of snap retaliation to Saddam’s capture.

“We are prepared,” Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of US troops in Iraq, vowed.

He had long doubted Saddam Hussein had any active role in the resistance.

“We do not expect at this time that we will have a complete elimination of these attacks. I believe these will continue for some time,” Gen Sanchez said.

“We’re gonna go ahead, we still have a lot of work to do in terms of identifying some of the former regime elements that are still operating in this country, that are still creating havoc and attacking the Iraqi people,” he said.

Even a top White House official who might have been forgiven for putting a more positive spin on the capture, warned of more bloodshed.

“We do expect that violence will continue,” said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.—AFP