Roadside bomb kills 3 Iraqi soldiers, bystander south of Baghdad

Roadside bomb kills 3 Iraqi soldiers, bystander

BAGHDAD — A roadside bomb killed three Iraqi soldiers responding to an earlier blast Saturday in an area south of Baghdad, officials said. One bystander was also killed.

The first explosion near municipal offices in the Rashid district did not cause casualties but was followed by a second bomb as security forces moved toward the scene — a common tactic of insurgents targeting police and soldiers.

Attacks against Iraq’s U.S.-trained security forces have helped undermine public confidence and have sown instability at a delicate time. The country’s politicians remain unable to come together to form a government after a March 7 parliamentary election, and Washington is intent on moving ahead with a U.S. troop withdrawal that will leave Iraqi forces on their own.

Eleven people were also injured in Saturday’s attack, police and hospital officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information to the news media.

Also Saturday, a website linked to Saddam Hussein’s now-outlawed Baath party posted an audio recording purportedly from a former top deputy of the late Iraqi dictator claiming that the party was “leading the fight to liberate” Iraq.

Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the highest-ranking at-large member of Saddam’s regime, is believed to be playing a key role in financing Sunni insurgents. He has a $10 million bounty on his head.

In the recording, al-Douri said repeated that attempts by Iraq’s post-Saddam governments to root out senior Baath party loyalists from public life were “doomed to failure.”

The authenticity of the recording could not immediately be verified. If real, it would be evidence that al-Douri, a former vice president long thought to be suffering from cancer, remains alive more than seven years after he went into hiding in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam’s regime.

The recording was issued to mark the occasion of the ascent to power by the Baath party in July 1968.

The last audio clip by al-Douri, whose whereabouts is unknown, was released in March.

In that recording, he addressed Arab leaders gathered in Libya for a summit, calling on them to recognize insurgents in Iraq as the sole legitimate representatives of the Iraqi people and saying they should represent Iraq at the summit.

Meanwhile, new information surfaced Saturday about a roadside bombing a day earlier that killed five members of a family driving in Diyala province north of the capital.

A police spokesman said the head of the family was a local leader of a government-backed group of Sunni militiamen known as Awakening Councils.

The group’s fighters rose up against al-Qaida militants in late 2006 and 2007, first joining the U.S. military in its fight against the terror network and later working with the Shiite-led Iraqi government.

The police spokesman, Maj. Ghalib al-Karkhi, had said earlier that the family was not the intended target.

Members of Awakening Councils have been frequent targets of al-Qaida militants.