Bomb Kills 12 in Baghdad; Second Iraqi Official Assassinated

The suicide attack near the U.S. Army’s Camp Cuervo was the 15th car bombing in June. The 12 dead included four police officers, according to the Associated Press.

Police stopped a suspicious car traveling down the wrong side of the road toward an Iraqi military college in southeast Baghdad, where many U.S. soldiers are also based, Reuters reported. The vehicle exploded as police approached it.

Kamal al-Jarah, 63, an Education Ministry official in charge of contacts with foreign countries and the United Nations, was shot Sunday as he left his home in the capital’s Ghazaliya district to go to work.

He died in the hospital, according to the Education Ministry.

A similarly precise attack occurred Saturday when an Iraqi deputy foreign minister, Bassam Salih Kubba, was shot while driving to work. He later died.

The Foreign Ministry said the attack “bears all the hallmarks of leftover supporters of Saddam Hussein’s evil regime.”

In Kirkuk, gunmen killed a locally prominent Kurdish cleric, Iyad Khorshid, late Saturday as he was heading to visit neighbors, the AP reported.

U.S. officials said insurgents may step up attacks before and after the June 30 transfer to Iraqi sovereignty — in particular targeting midlevel officials who do not have extensive security — in an effort to discredit the new Iraqi government.

U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations chief, said Americans would not withdraw quickly from Baghdad despite the handover of power. About 150,000 U.S. and other coalition troops will remain in the country to help improve security under a U.N. resolution unanimously approved by the Security Council on June 8.

On Saturday, seven Turkish contractors taken hostage last week were freed in Fallujah by their captors.

Serdar Adali, a director of the Turkish construction company which employed the contractors, told CNN-Turk television that “prominent families” in Iraq helped secure the release, according to the AP.

Al Arabiya television aired a videotape Thursday it said showed four of the seven hostages held by a group calling itself the Jihad Squadrons, an Iraqi Islamist group, which demanded Turkish companies leave Iraq.

Dozens of people from numerous countries have been kidnapped in Iraq since April, although many have been released or freed by coalition forces.