Iraq Blast Kills Five

A car bomb tore through a central Baghdad restaurant Wednesday just hours before the beginning of the new year, killing five people and injuring more than two dozen as a crowd of Iraqis and foreigners gathered for a low-key holiday celebration.

The 9 p.m. blast at the Nabil restaurant came at the end of a violent day of ethnic protests, bombings and attacks on foreign troops as Iraq marked the end of one tumultuous year and the beginning of another.

The explosion hit just hours after an American commander had warned of the potential for attacks over the holiday. The bomb demolished most of the restaurant, a popular eatery surrounded by small gardens in Baghdad’s upscale Arasat district, and left a large crater on a side street.

“This is a criminal attack and a terrorist act by people who have no morals or ethics,” Lt. Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, Iraq’s national police chief, told reporters at the scene. “It was a car bomb filled with TNT explosives.”

The five people killed were reportedly Iraqis.

Eight Los Angeles Times staff members were among those wounded. Salar Jaff, The Times’ Baghdad Bureau office manager, was driving to the restaurant behind three cars carrying his colleagues when the blast hit.

“The explosion came, and it was very strong. I thought my car was exploding also,” he said.

“I heard the screams. I saw two people putting their hands on their faces all covered with blood and their bodies were bleeding severely,” Jaff said. “The glass was everywhere. People were just lying there. The cars were smoking, they were on fire.”

Three Times reporters on assignment in Baghdad suffered cuts and other injuries that did not appear life-threatening.

The injured reporters were Chris Kraul, who normally works in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau; Tracy Wilkinson, the paper’s Rome Bureau chief; and Ann Simmons, formerly The Times’ Bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya. All were hospitalized.

An Iraqi driver employed by The Times was seriously wounded. Suffering cuts and minor injuries were two other Iraqi drivers, a translator and a computer technician who also work for The Times.

About 20 other people were wounded in the blast at the restaurant, where Iraqis and foreigners, many of them working for the occupation authority that now runs the country, had gathered for the New Year’s celebration.

The restaurant is adjacent to a hotel that was bombed in September, killing one employee. The hotel had been used by NBC as its Baghdad bureau.

The restaurant blast was the second car bombing of the day in Baghdad. Earlier, a car bomb exploded as a U.S. convoy passed on a street full of shops. The explosion destroyed a Humvee, killed an 8-year-old Iraqi boy and injured 21 people, including five U.S. soldiers and five Iraqi civil defense personnel, authorities said.

The boy, Ali Bassil Qassim, was killed as he played in his frontyard. His father, Bassil Qassim Ali, was walking home from his carpentry shop when he heard the explosion. He arrived to find the shredded, smoldering remains of the car beside a 5-foot-wide crater, and his son’s crumpled body under a retaining wall collapsed by the blast.

“I took him to the hospital, but they couldn’t do anything for him. Why do these people want to hurt us?” asked the disconsolate father. His wife and 3-year-old daughter were inside the house and were slightly injured.

Wednesday’s violence was not restricted to the capital. In the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, four people were killed in gunfire during a protest by Arabs and Turkmens protesting Kurdish aspirations to form a separate republic. Near the southern city of Basra, a South Korean was reported killed in an ambush and resulting gun battle between Romanian soldiers and Iraqi insurgents.

U.S. forces are conducting daily searches in an attempt to combat groups opposed to the U.S.-led occupation. At least 331 American military personnel have been killed in action since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March. Of those, 213 have died since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations May 1, according to Pentagon figures.

On Wednesday, U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police had stepped up security in the capital, erecting more razor wire and checkpoints in key areas as military officials had warned of possible attacks by insurgents over the New Year’s holiday.

Marking the change of year on Jan. 1 is, technically, a Christian holiday since it is based on the Gregorian calendar. The new year according to the Muslim calendar begins in February.

Still, many Iraqis, especially among the intelligentsia and entrepreneurial classes, have always celebrated on Dec. 31. And Jan. 1 has long been a legal holiday in Iraq. But this year, any spirit of joy and renewal is tempered by fear, uncertainty and ambivalence.

“I wouldn’t go out on New Year’s Eve even if I was allowed to,” Lena Ahmed, 21, an architecture student at Baghdad University, said earlier Wednesday. “I don’t think it’s going to be safe. I think whoever is responsible for these bombing incidents will try a thing or two for the simple reason that it is a symbolic event.”

Ahmed said that in contrast to previous years of fun-filled barbecues and dances, many of her girlfriends would gather for an afternoon party but ensconce themselves in their homes well before nightfall.

Still, some Iraqis ventured out to Nabil and other restaurants. After the blast tore through Nabil, the screams of the wounded and panicked filled the night air, Jaff said. Shop owners hurried to close their stores and run from what they feared could be a second blast. Dazed and bleeding wounded lay calling for their friends. Others were rushed in private cars to hospitals.

Times correspondent Kraul had just pulled up to the restaurant in a car and was sitting in the front passenger seat when the bomb exploded. He suffered injuries to his hand and eye.

“It’s not the way you expect it to be. It was this long force pushing you back,” Kraul said while awaiting surgery at a U.S. military hospital in Baghdad. Kraul said he apparently blacked out, and when he came to the building was in flames.

The restaurant, festooned with balloons and banners, had been the scene of a raucous New Year’s celebration a year ago. But this year, restaurateur Ramzi Hermes told The Times before the blast, the goal was to enjoy the holiday without attracting too much attention.

“It has to be a little more low-key this year,” he said.

Hermes, who owns the restaurant with his brother, Nabil, survived the blast, Reuters news agency reported.

Wilkinson and Kraul reported from Baghdad and Schrader from Washington. Also contributing were special correspondent Yalman Ahmed in Kirkuk and Times staff writer Said al-Rifai in Baghdad.