Aid Group Sees Crisis Looming in Iraqi Desert

As U.S.-led offensives on insurgent strongholds continue, Iraqi humanitarian officials are expressing concern about increasing problems for civilians in cities across the country’s vast western desert.

U.S. forces Thursday announced the detention of more than a dozen suspected insurgents in the city of Hit during the latest in a series of operations meant to disrupt rebel activity in Iraq’s volatile Al Anbar province. The military said it had taken over the city this week without incident.

In other recent operations in the province and along the Syrian border, U.S. Marines said they had killed at least 47 insurgents.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society says that 6,000 families have been displaced in Al Anbar by the fighting and that they are suffering in temperatures that regularly surpass 110 degrees. The group has dispatched five convoys of relief supplies to the region over the last few days, and medical teams are watching for cholera outbreaks caused by bodies buried in the rubble.

“It’s a tragedy,” said Ferdous Abadi, spokeswoman for the society. “There is a shortage of medical supplies and clean water.”

The society is the local equivalent of the Red Cross, and its president, Dr. Said Hakki, is an advisor on humanitarian affairs to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari.

The U.S. military did not respond to questions about the humanitarian situation. It has said in news releases that displaced families have begun to return home.

According to a report released Wednesday by the Honolulu-based Center of Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance, a U.S. organization that coordinates civilian and military humanitarian operations worldwide, about 7,000 Karabilah residents have been displaced in recent operations.

A medical official in the region said that in the last week, authorities had collected the bodies of dozens of people killed in the fighting. Dr. Munaim Aften, director of Ramadi Hospital, said he had taken possession of at least 50 bodies discovered in and around Qaim and Karabilah.

The dead included three women as well as four men with Egyptian passports, and some of the bodies had been mutilated beyond recognition, he said in a telephone interview.

A security official just back from Ramadi said that on Sunday, bodies had overburdened the local morgue. “Everyone stayed away from the hospital because of the smell of decaying bodies,” said the official, who asked that his name not be used because he feared retribution from insurgents.

Across Iraq on Thursday, insurgents continued their campaign to intimidate Iraqi security forces.

In Baghdad, gunmen killed the cousin of national security advisor Mowaffak Rubaie. The victim, Taher Kadhem Rubayee, was working at his eyeglass shop in the Amiriya district Thursday night when the attackers stormed in and killed him, an employee and three customers, an Interior Ministry official said.

In Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of the capital, gunmen in a car attempted to assassinate Col. Shalaan Abdul Khaleq, head of the city’s elite Rapid Intervention Force.

The colonel’s brother and two civilians were killed in the attack and the ensuing hourlong gunfight. Khaleq was severely wounded.

In Hawija, a Sunni Arab-dominated city southwest of Kirkuk, an Iraqi army officer who was kidnapped Tuesday was found dead, police said.

In the last month, U.S. forces have launched several offensives in Sunni Muslim areas of the country in an effort to disrupt insurgent activity.

In Karabilah, Marines freed four hostages who they said showed signs of torture. Several bomb factories were uncovered, and 17 car bombs were disarmed, officials said.

Sunni leaders charge that such operations could be counterproductive as an October referendum on a national constitution draws near.

“If this will continue until the elections, then we fear that what happened last time will repeat itself,” said Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni leader who is to serve on the committee drawing up the constitution. “If they continue attacking the cities, again no one will vote.”

U.S. officials released figures Thursday showing that suicide and remote-controlled car bombs -- the insurgents’ deadliest weapon -- had increased almost fivefold in May 2005 compared with a year earlier.

Twenty car bombs exploded or were disarmed in May 2004, compared with 99 in May of this year.

The new figures are lower than those previously released. In May, a senior U.S. military intelligence official told journalists that a record 135 suicide and remote-controlled car bombs had exploded in April and that at least 142 had gone off in May. A spokesman could not explain the discrepancy.

About half the car bombings in Iraq now involve suicide drivers; the rest are detonated by remote control.

A suicide car bomb is considered “precision-guided” compared with a remote-controlled bomb, which often misses its target.

Attackers on foot wearing bombs in vests, belts and backpacks have also killed hundreds of people in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

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Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell, special correspondent Asmaa Waguih and correspondents in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Baqubah contributed to this report.