Car Bombing Kills 24 in Basra

A spate of insurgent attacks Monday killed two dozen holiday shoppers in the southern city of Basra and also took the lives of six American soldiers, making October the deadliest month for the U.S. military in Iraq since January.

A car bomb in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, exploded about 9 p.m. on popular Algiers Street as residents shopped for clothes and sweets in preparation for the feast commemorating the end of the holy month of Ramadan later this week.

The blast destroyed or damaged at least eight shops, cut off electricity and brought chaos and panic to one of the most crowded parts of the city.

“We saw fire and lots of smoke,” said Khudair Mayahi, owner of a dairy products store near the site of the explosion. “Bodies were just lying on the street.”

Insurgents elsewhere killed at least six American soldiers Monday, and a Marine was killed Sunday, pushing the U.S. military death toll for October to 92. That is the highest monthly toll since January, when the bloody run-up to parliamentary elections claimed the lives of 106 U.S. military personnel.

The October toll is up sharply from the 49 Americans who died in September. At least 2,025 American military personnel have died in the Iraq theater, nearly 80% of them in hostile incidents, since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Though the rising death toll has presented political problems at home and abroad for the Bush administration, White House officials have adhered to their stance: that the fallen troops have died for a just cause.

The administration “mourns the loss of each and every one of our men and women in uniform who have made the ultimate sacrifice to make the world freer and more peaceful,” White House spokesman Frederick Jones said Monday. “And the best way to honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice is to prevail in the war on terrorism.”

But even longtime international supporters of the U.S.-led invasion, such as Italy, with about 3,000 troops in Iraq, appear to be backing away from the administration. In a television interview aired Monday in Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, now visiting President Bush in Washington, was quoted as saying that he “tried on several occasions to convince the American president not to wage war.”

U.S. military officials said the most recent increase in fatalities did not necessarily mean that the insurgency was gaining strength.

“You cannot determine at this point if it is an upsurge or anomaly from one data point,” said Army Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman. “Sometimes [insurgents] are able to achieve their desired results no matter what we do. However, those are limited and far between.”

Insurgents have unleashed a flurry of deadly attacks against Iraqi Shiites and American troops in the last week, killing nearly two dozen soldiers and Marines. Almost all Americans killed by insurgents in October were in the capital or the Sunni Arab western and central parts of the country.

Sunni Arabs, who make up about a fifth of Iraq’s 26 million people, dominated the upper ranks of Iraq’s officer corps and civil service during Saddam Hussein’s rule. They now bristle at their loss of power and prestige under a government dominated by majority Shiite Muslims and non-Arab Kurds.

U.S. and Iraqi officials hope that drawing Sunnis into Iraq’s nascent political scene can allay Sunni anger.

In contrast to the Jan. 30 vote that Sunnis largely boycotted, dozens of Sunni Arab coalitions, parties and politicians have signed up to take part in Dec. 15 elections.

Still, the attacks continue.

The Basra bombing, which police and hospital officials said killed at least 24 people and injured as many as 100, followed a truck bomb explosion Saturday evening that killed at least 25 Shiite villagers near Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Basra police officers said the explosives in the Monday night attack were packed into a white Toyota parked in one of the city’s most crowded districts.

Hospital officials said some victims were burned beyond recognition. Two hours after the bombing, trucks with loudspeakers roamed the streets and called on residents to donate blood.

Residents bemoaned the continued deterioration of security in Basra, a predominantly Shiite port city that had suffered under Hussein’s regime.

“Basra is very safe in general,” said Hossein Zayiban, a police officer who was near the site of the blast. “But now the people are very frightened, and this will affect people very much.”

Insurgents target Iraqi civilians with car bombs, but roadside bombs have become the weapon of choice in the guerrilla campaign against the U.S. military. On Monday, four soldiers attached to the 3rd Infantry Division in Yusufiya, southwest of Baghdad, and two soldiers with the 29th Brigade Combat Team near Balad, 50 miles north of the capital, were killed by improvised explosives, as was the Marine killed Sunday during combat operations near Amiriya, west of Baghdad.

Boylan said the military was persistent in its efforts to blunt the effectiveness of roadside bombs, often assembled out of old Iraqi military munitions weighing hundreds of pounds and activated by increasingly sophisticated remote-controlled triggers.

But the insurgents get smarter too.

“As we have seen in the past, we are facing a thinking enemy who will try to counter our tactics that prove to be effective against them,” Boylan said in an e-mailed response to questions. “This is a continuous cycle of action, reaction, counteraction and counter-counteraction.”

Earlier Monday, Marines backed by jets attacked insurgent targets near the Syrian border, Associated Press reported.

A military statement made no mention of casualties on the ground, but local sources said the dead included civilians.

Violence also continued in the capital.

A car bomb targeting a passing U.S. military convoy in Baghdad’s Shula neighborhood injured five civilians but caused no American casualties.

A mortar round landing in the mostly Sunni Arab Zayona district killed one civilian and injured four others.

In the Dora neighborhood, gunmen killed a police major and shot dead his driver. The Baghdad neighborhood, often used as a launching pad for mortar rounds fired into the heavily fortified Green Zone, has become increasingly violent in recent weeks. On Sunday, gunmen killed three men in a local currency exchange shop.

U.S. and Iraqi soldiers raided suspected insurgent strongholds in the area near Dora over the weekend, arresting 49 suspected rebels and seizing bomb-making materials, a dozen assault rifles and three machine guns after searching hundreds of homes in the area, a news release said.

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Times staff writers Tyler Marshall and Peter Wallsten in Washington and special correspondent Othman Ghanim in Basra contributed to this report.