Drive-by shooting, bomb blast take to 8 number traffic police killed in Baghdad this week

Police: 3 more traffic cops killed in Baghdad

BAGHDAD — A drive-by shooting and a bomb hidden in a motorcycle killed three traffic policemen in Baghdad on Friday, taking to eight the number from the city’s force killed this week, police and hospital officials said.

The rash of killings suggested insurgents were targeting traffic policemen specifically for the first time since the insurgency began in 2003. Iraqi security officials said militants from al-Qaida in Iraq or affiliated groups are likely behind the slayings, viewing the mostly unarmed personnel as easy targets whose killing creates a sense of lawlessness in Iraq’s most heavily guarded city.

Two traffic police were killed in a drive-by shooting in a western Baghdad neighborhood Friday in which gunmen used pistols fitted with silencers, police officials said. A third was killed in central Baghdad by a bomb hidden in a parked motorcycle. The blast wounded four others, they said.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

“We demand that we be given firearms to defend ourselves and our families,” said a 35-year-old traffic policeman in the central Karradah district who only gave his nickname, Abu Zeid. “Our life is difficult as it is without this on top.”

Baghdad’s traffic cops have one of the toughest jobs in the city. They are out during those merciless 120 degree Fahrenheit (49 degree Celsius) summer days on streets that have for years been among the world’s most dangerous. The force does more than direct traffic or issue tickets — it also brings order to a city struggling to regain normalcy after seven years of violence.

Members of the force have been killed in crossfire shootings and bombings, but there hasn’t previously been such a string of killings in which they were the intended victims.

Five traffic cops were killed and 11 others wounded on Tuesday and Wednesday by bombings targeting their patrols and one attached to a police vehicle. A street booth used by traffic cops in eastern Baghdad was blown up Thursday, but no one was hurt. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

“What they want is to push us into quitting our jobs,” another member of the force, Abu Mohammed, said as he took shelter from the late morning sun under a tree in an eastern Baghdad neighborhood. “Already, I have noticed that some of us did not come to work today.”

The capital was without traffic police for months after its capture by U.S. forces in 2003 and the city’s unruly motorists did as they pleased, driving on sidewalks and against incoming traffic. But the traffic police, with the help of American troops, have slowly begun to regain control of the streets.

“I am surprised that we are being targeted,” said a traffic police lieutenant in the western Mansour area who identified himself as Abu Zahraa. “Our only weapon is the pen we use to write tickets.”

The attacks come less than a month before the deadline set by President Barack Obama for the U.S. military to draw down the number of American troops in the country to 50,000. That number is expected to remain level into next spring at least, Maj. Gen. Stephen Lanza, the top American military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters Friday.

There are just under 64,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now, he said — down from nearly 170,000 at the height of the surge in late 2007 that is credited in part with turning around the war. A security agreement with the Iraqi government requires all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

A senior Shiite politician, meanwhile, told The Associated Press that Obama has sent a letter to Iraq’s top Shiite cleric this week, reassuring the spiritual leader of America’s “firm” commitment to Iraq and explaining the rationale behind the U.S. military drawdown.

The letter to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was delivered by an Iraqi intermediary, said the politician, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to share the information with the media. The politician did not reveal the identity of the go-between.

The White House and Hamed al-Khafaf, a Beirut-based representative of al-Sistani, declined to comment on the report. Officials at al-Sistani’s office south of Baghdad in the holy city of Najaf could not be reached for confirmation.

Al-Sistani, deeply revered by Iraq’s majority Shiites, has not received American officials since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, but he is known to have received messages from them through third parties.

Associated Press Writers Saad Abdul-Kadir and Hamid Ahmed in Baghdad and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Boston contributed to this report.