Another Police Station Attacked

Heavily armed insurgents launched a frontal assault Wednesday on a police station near Baghdad, killing a battalion commander and three of his men in the second such large-scale operation in two days.

Meanwhile, separate rebel attacks on two vehicles in the capital killed 15 pilgrims returning from the southern city of Karbala -- the deadliest incident of this week’s annual mourning period observed by millions of Shiite Muslims.

The bloodshed demonstrated the continuing insurgent threat on multiple fronts. In the month since they blew up the Golden Mosque, a Shiite shrine in Samarra, Sunni Arab insurgents have been locked with Shiite militias in an escalating communal conflict that has led to the killing of hundreds of Iraqis of both sects, many of them unarmed and ambushed on the road or dragged from their homes in the night.

The bodies of 11 men were found Wednesday in various parts of Baghdad, some of them blindfolded and bearing signs of torture.

Insurgents also have staged daring attacks on Iraqi government and U.S. targets.

The latest was a predawn raid Wednesday by dozens of insurgents on the police facility in Madaen, 15 miles southeast of the capital. Their exact number was unclear because of the darkness. The city is at the northern tip of the so-called triangle of death, a mostly Sunni region rife with sectarian violence.

The Madaen attack was slightly smaller in scale than the dawn raid Tuesday on a judicial and police compound in Muqdadiya, 60 miles northeast of Baghdad, in which at least 17 policemen and guards were killed and 33 prisoners freed.

Emerging from a nearby palm grove, the attackers in Madaen fired 14 mortar rounds into the compound, which houses City Hall and a police battalion, triggering a two-hour shootout that lasted until daybreak, the Interior Ministry said.

The insurgents also fired grenade launchers and automatic rifles but failed to overrun the compound. In addition to the four police officers killed, five were wounded. There was no word on insurgent casualties.

Later in the day, police raided homes in the area and detained 76 men for questioning, the ministry said. One was identified as a Syrian who was carrying insurgent leaflets.

Iraqi police and soldiers have been stretched thin trying to guard the estimated 2 million black-clad pilgrims who walked to and from Karbala this week to mark the 40th and final day of the annual mourning period for Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad.

Insurgents with machine guns fired into a bus taking pilgrims home Wednesday through Baghdad’s Sunni-dominated Amiriya district. Fourteen people were killed and 18 wounded, police said. Two police officers died in a shootout with the assailants.

One pilgrim was killed and 22 were wounded in a later attack on a pickup truck in the capital’s Adil neighborhood, police said.

At least five other Iraqis were reported killed Wednesday, including an interpreter for two British soldiers whose foot patrol was hit by a roadside bomb blast in the southern city of Basra. Both soldiers were wounded.

Times staff writer Zainab Hussein and special correspondent Asmaa Waguih contributed to this report.