Attacks Mar Anniversary of Return to Iraqi Rule

A flurry of car bombings, the assassination of an octogenarian lawmaker and a new Marine offensive in volatile western Iraq marked the first anniversary Tuesday of the nation’s return to sovereignty.

There were no overt signs of celebration on the date marking the return of power to Iraqis as the bloody insurgency took the lives of at least a dozen more people, according to news agency accounts and reports from across the country. The U.S.-led coalition that ran Iraq following the ouster of Saddam Hussein returned sovereignty to the nation on June 28, 2004.

Among the dead Tuesday were at least two U.S. soldiers, one killed by a suicide bomber near Balad, north of the capital, and the other the victim of a car bomb near Tikrit, Hussein’s tribal base.

American troops shot and killed an Iraqi television executive, Ahmed Wael Bakri, program director for Al Sharqiya television, when he drove near a U.S. convoy in Baghdad, Associated Press reported. He was believed to be the third Iraqi journalist killed in such circumstances during the last week, the news service reported.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. military in Baghdad said she had no information on the incident.

U.S. convoys are frequent targets of suicide car bombs and troops will fire at suspicious vehicles deemed a threat. The convoys carry signs in Arabic and English warning motorists to keep their distance.

An apparent suicide attack took the life of Sheik Dhari Fayad, who, in his late 80s, was the eldest legislator sitting in Iraq’s transitional National Assembly. His son and two bodyguards also were killed when a car bomb struck the sheik’s vehicle northeast of Baghdad, officials said.

He was the second legislator in the 275-member parliament to be assassinated. In April, gunmen shot and killed another member, Lamia Abed Khadouri Sakri, as she stood outside her home.

Attendance for assembly sessions is often less than half, in part because of security concerns, officials said.

The slain legislator was a Shiite Muslim tribal chieftain and member of the ruling Shiite coalition who had presided over the first sessions of Iraq’s new parliament before a speaker was elected. Fellow legislators condemned his slaying, with the parliament labeling it the work of “terrorist criminals.” In Iraq, the elderly are traditionally accorded considerable respect.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish chieftain, congratulated the Iraqi people for the return of sovereignty one year ago, but he told reporters that “the real independence day” was Jan. 30, when the country held its first free elections in half a century.

Long-repressed Shiites and Kurds dominated those electoral results, turning the tables on decades of rule by the Sunni Arab minority. Sunni Arabs largely stayed away from the polls and are underrepresented in the National Assembly.

Disenfranchised Sunni Arabs are believed to constitute the backbone of the insurgency that has racked Iraq for more than two years, costing thousands of lives and thwarting the Bush administration’s plans to rapidly rebuild this nation. Shiites and Kurds in parliament are working to increase Sunni Arab representation on the parliamentary committee drafting a new constitution for Iraq.

About 1,000 Marines and other U.S. troops, supplemented by Iraqi forces, launched the latest offensive Tuesday in volatile Al Anbar province, a predominantly Sunni Arab region in western Iraq that is largely out of direct government control. The offensive, named Operation Sword, targeted insurgents based in the Euphrates River Valley region between the cities of Hit and Haditha, both notorious guerrilla strongholds.

U.S. troops have launched numerous offensives in Hit, Haditha and other Euphrates towns, but rebels have eventually returned once the military pulled out. Marines acknowledge that there are not enough troops to have a permanent presence in every guerrilla enclave along the river, which stretches for hundreds of miles to the Syrian border.

Elsewhere in Iraq, four possibly coordinated car bombs detonated Tuesday afternoon in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad. At least one person was killed and six injured. And, south of the capital, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a hospital in the town of Musayyib, killing a police officer and injuring at least 13 civilians.