Car Bombs, Suicide Attacks Taking Toll

A series of five bombings that killed more than 60 people Wednesday in Iraq is part of an escalating guerrilla offensive that has cost about 400 lives in the last two weeks and has seen daily attacks nearly double since March.

Insurgents are staging about 75 attacks a day, up from 30 to 40 daily six weeks ago, according to the U.S. military. Increasingly, the rebels appear to be employing car bombs. In April, the military recorded 135 car bombs, almost doubling the number in March, said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a military spokesman here.

This month, when as many as a dozen car bombs have exploded in a single day, may set a bleak new record. U.S. authorities concede that they have yet to find a way to control the insurgents’ most effective weapon. “There’s no foolproof method against it,” Boylan said.

The offensive appears to coincide with the seating of a U.S.-backed government three months after a parliamentary election in January.

“They [the insurgents] are clearly making a renewed effort,” said a U.S. official here who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of Washington’s position. “I would guess but cannot prove that some of this is related to the formation of the government, since I think one of the things that took a piece out of the insurgency was the election. And they need to show they’re not down and out.”

Military officials said the surge in violence more than two years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein was probably the result of weeks of planning and marshaling of resources, especially suicide bombers and bomb-laden vehicles.

“It’s a spike: When it will go in the other direction we don’t know,” Boylan said. “They’re expending a lot of resources right now. We don’t know how long they’ll be capable of sustaining it.”

Marines have captured or killed scores of guerrillas in an offensive underway in western Iraq aimed at foreign fighters allegedly infiltrating from neighboring Syria. Although some officials and experts have hypothesized that the most fervent insurgents are foreigners, not Iraqis, that idea has been increasingly discounted.

“There’s a kind of axiom out there that says Iraqis aren’t suicide bombers,” Gen. George W. Casey, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad this year. “I’m not sure that’s the case. I believe there are Iraqi Islamic extremists ... that are very capable of getting into cars and blowing themselves up.”

U.S. officials believe that the bulk of the guerrilla force is made up of disenchanted Sunni Arab Iraqis, including many who lost their livelihoods after the fall of Hussein, and that no more than 10% of the guerrilla force is composed of foreigners. That would be no more than 2,000 of the 20,000 hard-core fighters said to be operating in Iraq, according to rough estimates from government and private experts. More than 10,000 guerrilla suspects are also in U.S. custody in Iraq.

Military officials say the ongoing offensive in the west has had some success, but commanders acknowledge that rebels could reoccupy the isolated towns and villages in the vastness of the Syrian border region once the troops leave.

“We’re dealing with a tyranny of distance here,” said Col. Bob Chase, chief of operations for the 2nd Marine Division in western Iraq.

Repeatedly during the two-year insurgency, U.S. offensives in various towns have been followed by the reemergence of guerrillas once American forces pulled back.

Insurgents have returned in significant numbers to cities such as Samarra and Tall Afar, where major U.S. invasions last year ousted rebels. The northern city of Mosul has also undergone several waves of guerrilla surges beaten down by U.S.-led attacks. Mosul remains a hotbed of guerrilla activity.

An exception to the trend of guerrilla re-infiltration is Fallouja, once seen as the nerve center of the nation’s insurgency. The city west of the capital remains largely sealed off, guarded by thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops who search every person and vehicle entering town.

But there aren’t enough U.S. troops or trained Iraqi forces to stay behind and provide security in the far reaches of isolated Al Anbar province, where the incoming governor was kidnapped Tuesday in another example of the lawlessness that prevails in much of the nation’s Sunni Arab heartland.

The U.S. has about 140,000 troops in Iraq, and about 162,000 Iraqi troops and police officers have been “trained and equipped,” according to the military. But Iraqi forces remain short of armor, logistics units and a reliable command structure. They continue to be subject to infiltration and occasional desertion. Accusations of torture and beatings have hurt their credibility in some communities.

Training and equipping Iraqi forces is part of a two-pronged U.S. strategy to defeat the insurgency. The second element is the political process.

American authorities hope that the nation’s new government will start to win over many disaffected Sunni Arabs, giving them less reason to fight. That would isolate the most hard-core elements -- religious militants and fanatical ex-Baathists -- who could then be crushed militarily.

“This is really hard, OK?” said a second U.S. official. “This is nation-building and it’s fighting an insurgency and it’s standing up an Iraqi force all at the same time under time pressure. And it’s really very difficult.”

The capital is where Iraqi police and soldiers are most evident and have perhaps done the best job, U.S. officials say. They point to the relative calm of Haifa Street, once a hub of insurgent attacks now patrolled regularly by Iraqi officers.

But Baghdad remains an edgy place where bombs go off daily, assassinations are a common event and National Assembly members are obliged to conduct their sessions deep in the U.S.-protected Green Zone; many legislators cannot even make the meetings because of security fears. One was assassinated at her home the day the government was announced two weeks ago.

The spasm of violence that struck three Iraqi cities Wednesday was in many ways emblematic of the rebel strategy. Far from being random, the guerrillas are zeroing in on specific targets and sending pointed messages.

In one attack, a bomber wearing a suicide vest targeted Iraqi military recruits in Hawija, a rebel stronghold 150 miles north of Baghdad, killing 34 and injuring 52, police said. The attack was probably intended to discourage young Sunni Arab men from joining the armed forces, which have largely been made up of Shiite and Kurdish volunteers committed to the new government. Without Sunni recruits, U.S. officials acknowledge, it will be hard to form an effective security service.

In another attack, a car bomber struck a group of mostly Shiite migrant workers in the largely Sunni town of Tikrit, killing 30 and wounding about 75, police said.

The Tikrit carnage was celebrated on a militant Sunni website as a successful strike on “apostate workers,” Reuters reported. The incident seemed sure to widen the sectarian divide in a nation where retaliatory killings among Shiites and Sunnis have become a disturbing trend.

In Baghdad, at least three more car bombs struck police stations and patrols, killing four people and wounding more than a dozen, underscoring the danger for anyone joining the Iraqi forces.

Amid the chaos, U.S. officials expressed guarded confidence that their strategy was on track.

“This is going to be a really hard year,” conceded the first U.S. official. “We’re not on some automatic glide path to foreordained victory. We’re not there yet. We’ve got major issues we’ve got to get through this year.”

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Times staff writers Raheem Salman and Saif Rasheed contributed to this report.