Bombing Kills 4 Iraqi Officers

The police sergeant was standing before the captain’s wide desk when the bomb went off. Two other officers had been listening as the sergeant talked to the captain while another lounged on a couch. Policemen were walking in and out of the small office, preparing for the usual 9 a.m. briefing.

When the appointed hour came, the sergeant, Leiftha Gotreef Yousef, 30, was still talking and officers were just filing into the meeting.

At that moment the couch exploded, destroyed in the detonation of a bomb secreted underneath.

The lounger and two listeners died immediately, their blood flecking the ceiling fan and shrouding the walls in a star-like spray. They absorbed most of the blast, but that did not protect Yousef’s legs, the face and hand of the captain, or other officers caught when two walls crumbled.

Altogether, the blast Saturday morning killed four policemen and seriously wounded 10 others in this small town 40 miles south of Baghdad, part of a chorus of explosions and gunfire that have killed more than 300 Iraqi policemen since the war’s end, according to U.S. commanders. About 150,000 people have been recruited for Iraq’s new security forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein. They are confronting threats from insurgents as well as criminals, U.S. military and police officials say.

“The trend line is going up,” said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a U.S. military spokesman.

U.S.-led occupation forces also continue to be targeted. The U.S. military said one soldier was killed by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad on Sunday.

There are questions, however, about whether Iraqi police have been in on some of the attacks. Late Saturday in Qadisiya, a village 30 miles south of Tikrit, gunmen -- including an Iraqi police major -- opened fire on U.S. soldiers, sparking a battle in which the major was killed, the U.S. military reported.

And in Suwayrah, Hadi Rufadi Hamza, the captain who has served as police chief in the town for the last year, said a member of the police staff must have planted the bomb that killed four of his officers. Only officers have keys to the captain’s office, he said.

“Some of our staff is from the ex-regime,” said Hamza, a 40-year-old ex-military officer.

He sat in a living room crowded with men who listened intently as he spoke, gesturing with a blistered hand and having difficulty forming the words because burns covered half his face. “I have doubts about many of them, but what can we do? We need policemen and they are the ones who volunteer.

“All of Iraq is scared,” he said. “Now we expect death in any spot.”

A U.S. military spokesman said authorities are pursuing a missing Suwayrah security guard, and Iraqi officials have detained two policemen for questioning about the blast. But in cities such as this, which served as a base for Hussein’s Republican Guard, it is unclear whether the danger can be contained.

Hamza said his forces arrested a group of criminals three weeks ago and transferred them to a holding station 15 miles south. Two days later, the group was back in Suwayrah, released by corrupt police.

His force captures looters and thieves, Hamza said, but with each arrest it risks angering insurgent forces and drawing attacks. Hamza is uncertain if his attackers were motivated by politics, crime, or both.

“Every arrest is like a bomb,” he said. “We don’t know what it will set off.”

At a hospital a half-mile north, Yousef lay with his legs swathed in gauze and his wounded face smeared with a yellow disinfectant. It is unclear whether he will walk again, or even survive. In the next room, three worried siblings tended another policeman, a 19-year-old who was in a coma.

Hamza said he did not want any more U.S. or allied forces in his town. They cannot catch the perpetrators of this bombing, he said, and they only bring danger.

“We know our enemies better than the Americans,” he said, painfully shifting. “We live with them.”