2 Suicide Bombers Kill at Least 14 in Iraq

Suicide bombers simultaneously ripped apart two police stations north of Baghdad on Saturday, killing 14 people -- including a 10-year-old girl whose last words were “Daddy, help” -- on a bloody day in which insurgents succeeded for the first time in striking a plane leaving Baghdad’s airport.

The plane, a DHL cargo jet taking off for Bahrain, returned safely to the runway after its left wing was struck by what authorities believed was a surface-to-air missile. In recent weeks, hostile fire is believed to have been involved in the crashes of five U.S. military helicopters, killing 39 Americans.

The suicide attacks here in the village of Khan Bani Saad and in nearby Baqubah, less than an hour’s drive north of Baghdad, marked an apparent shift in strategy by insurgents who have made a point of targeting those seen as cooperating with the U.S.-led coalition. The holy month of Ramadan began with a series of tightly coordinated assaults on three police stations in the heavily fortified capital. The fasting month was ending with massive explosions at lightly protected stations in the perilous “Sunni Triangle” in central Iraq, the heart of the insurgency.

“The security situation in Baghdad is better than before, so those people are executing criminal acts outside of Baghdad,” Iraq’s national police chief, Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, said in an interview.

Coalition Provisional Authority officials acknowledged that tighter security in Baghdad had driven attackers elsewhere.

“Some areas are viewed as higher priorities than others because of the security situation,” a coalition official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Clearly, we’ll have to ramp up security there as necessary.”

Many police officers complain that the occupying Americans have made them the soft targets of choice for bombers.

Officer Aqeel Suheil Abid, left blood-spattered and trapped beneath a car in Saturday’s bombing in Khan Bani Saad, said that he had had enough.

“I pulled myself out gradually and saw the rest of my colleagues. One was decapitated. The other was torn apart. It was horrifying,” Abid said from his bed at Baqubah General Hospital. “I absolutely will not return to work, no matter what kind of salary they give me. After seeing my friends torn apart, staying is not an option.”

Other officers contend that they have become easy targets because the coalition is rushing officers’ training and skimping on protective gear.

“We don’t have proper training. We don’t have proper equipment,” said Maj. Ali Ismael Fattah, head of internal affairs in Baqubah, wearing a blue “Fresno Police” baseball cap.

Surveying the massive bomb crater in Baqubah -- where a hubcap, auto grill and bloodstained sandal lay in a muddy crater 25 feet across and half as deep -- police official Hussein Ismael Hameed nodded in agreement.

“Our enemies are better equipped than we are,” said Hameed, head of the station’s central investigative division.

Iraqi police and U.S. defense officials said the coordinated timing of the attacks and the use of suicide bombers bore the hallmarks of foreign extremists.

. “We believe from our intelligence that it is either the Syrians or the Wahhabis,” Fattah said, referring to a fundamentalist Islamic sect. He did not elaborate.

Last week, U.S. authorities had issued an intelligence warning that suicide bombers in three cars were targeting police stations, a senior Baqubah police official said. On Friday night, police in Baqubah discovered a crude explosive remote control and wires less than 100 yards from the site of Saturday’s explosion.

In Baghdad, authorities believe that a SAM-7 surface-to-air missile was used in the attack Saturday on the DHL plane at the airport.

All three crew members evacuated safely, said Patricia Thomson, a spokeswoman at the global package delivery service’s headquarters in Brussels. DHL did not release their names. Thomson would say only that two were Belgian nationals and the other a British national.

DHL and Royal Jordanian, the only commercial carrier to Baghdad, canceled all flights through Monday.

Hours earlier, the suicide attackers struck in Khan Bani Saad and Baqubah about 7:30 a.m., before many officers and other workers had left their homes.

In Khan Bani Saad, 1st Lt. Abbas Ghaidan, 28, was stepping out of his car at the front gate of the police headquarters moments before a car pulled up. Witnesses later described it as a black Chevrolet Caprice bearing a temporary plate indicating that it had been imported from Kuwait.

Witnesses said the bomber was donning a blue police-style shirt as he steered the car toward the station, as if trying to bluff his way in.

That was when officer Ali Khaleel put himself between the car and the station and fired until the vehicle ran him down, an act that colleagues and villagers said stopped the bomber from penetrating the station wall and killing more inside.

“He kept shooting at the car until it hit him. He was struck by the car and then by the bomb,” Mayor Naif Maghithy Mechem Zady said in his office across the street, its doors blown off their hinges, the floor a carpet of glass and plaster ceiling tiles.

The blast blew a 10-foot-wide hole in the pavement, killing six police officers, three civilians and the bomber. Ten officers were wounded.

Across the street from the station, Nasir Abdul-Rihman and his 10-year-old daughter, Ibtihal -- Arabic for “prayer to God” -- were cleaning his tiny variety shop when the bomber struck. She had begged him to let her skip school and join him at work, and he had acquiesced.

After the explosion ripped through his store, Abdul-Rihman, a retired army captain, heard the most terrifying words of his life: “Daddy, help.” The lower half of Ibtihal’s body was missing. In the ambulance, he realized she was dead.

“Who will bear the responsibility of taking her life and her blood?” Abdul-Rihman said from his hospital bed, his body riddled with shrapnel, tears streaming down his face. “May God kill them in this holy month of Ramadan.”

Neighbors expressed anger at both the attackers and the United States.

“If we could get our hands on whoever did this, God would forgive anything one did to him,” said attorney Abdul Hussein Saadi, 24, who carried Ibtihal to the ambulance. “These people were innocent. They were serving their country.” But he nodded in agreement as another resident, Ali Abdullar Murad, laid the blame on President Bush.

“We used to have security,” Murad said. “If it weren’t for Bush, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The devastation was similar in Baqubah, where at least six people -- four police officers, an 8-year-old girl and the bomber -- were killed. Witnesses said a Toyota Land Cruiser pulled into the parking lot in front of the station and halted at the insistence of an officer at the building’s front gate.

The explosion shattered every window and blew off nearly every door in the two-story structure. Debris from a bricked-in window tumbled down on five prisoners, who were reportedly unharmed. Officers resting at the end of a late shift were sprayed by shards of glass.

Bloodstains spattered the office walls and a brown storage locker bearing the name of Hassan Hadi Hameeb, who was killed near the now-mangled gates. The blast wounded 26 police officers -- one-sixth of the precinct’s total force -- and 11 civilians.

The death toll was expected to rise. In an otherwise empty room at Baqubah General, his face a patchwork of stitches, a man rescued from Khan Bani Saad lay alone, his eyes half-open, the monotone of a respirator echoing off the unadorned walls. A bloodstained Iraqi police armband lay by his side. In place of his name, a piece of paper at his bedside read, “Unknown.” That would become a problem when it came time to notify relatives, a nurse said.

“This guy,” he said, “isn’t going to make it.”

Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin in Baghdad and Faye Fiore in Washington and researchers Salar Jaff and Suhail Ahmed in Baghdad contributed to this report.