Baghdad Bombings Killed 40 on Thursday

TERENCE SMITH:

Karl Vick, welcome. This seems to have been a particularly costly day in Iraq, with attacks in Baghdad and around the country. Can you put it in perspective for us?

KARL VICK:

Well, the most relevant effect probably is that we… in a year, almost a year-and-a-half of conflict here, we've never seen this kind of death toll among, you know, the most innocent of the innocent– among children. You know, it probably summons up memories of what happened in Russia a few weeks ago as much as anything.

But in another way, it's somewhat emblematic of the month of September in Iraq, where the car bomb, which we've always sort of associated with the insurgency here, or the resistance, whatever you want to call this, is really emerged as a sort of tactical weapon here. A brigadier told me yesterday– and that was as of yesterday, before today's three or four strikes– they had more than 40. It counted for like almost half of all the car bombings in Iraq since the war began.

TERENCE SMITH:

You mean they had more than 40 just in the month of September?

KARL VICK:

Yes. That's right.

TERENCE SMITH:

Late today, the group headed by the alleged terrorist leader al Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attacks in Baghdad and just outside. Is that credible?

KARL VICK:

That's entirely credible. His group or he personally has claimed responsibility for most of the suicide attacks. It's pretty much their signature weapon. And Iraqis will tell you Iraqis would never do this and that it takes a sort of fanatical foreigner, a Wahabi or whatever extremist strain they want to label it with, to do something like this.

TERENCE SMITH:

And al Zarqawi is himself Jordanian, is he not?

KARL VICK:

Yes, he is, and you know, you often hear Iraqis say, "no Iraqi could do this." There have been Iraqi suicides, suiciders, as President Bush calls them. But by and large, you know, one of the signatures is a foreign fighter, somebody who has come to Iraq specifically to fight the Americans and to give up his life, you know, and to become a martyr and go straight to heaven and… in the view of that theology.

TERENCE SMITH:

Right. Do these attacks seem coordinated? I mean, they were in Baghdad, they were in the North; they were elsewhere in the country, just today. Does that seem coordinated?

KARL VICK:

Yes, quite coordinated. I mean, today's was… the really horrific one today was… was in two phases, as you've heard in this report. I mean, first, they planted this… apparently the first bomb was detonated by remote control and had been left inside the perimeter of this ceremony, this perimeter that supposedly had been secured by the Iraqi national guard, and it detonated as the ceremony was sort of ending. And then a half an hour later, while there's all these people on the scene, you know, somebody drives in and blows up this gray sedan that they drove in.

The other one, the one outside Abu Ghraib, we had a reporter there who was talking to Iraqis who said that the truck, I think it was a pickup truck that was full of explosives and gasoline, was waiting outside this municipality center for this convoy to arrive, was waiting some two hours. And about 15 minutes before the explosion, a taxicab full of apparently Iraqi men with their faces covered, arrived, fanned out into a nearby bazaar, and warned the local people that something was going to happen and they should evacuate. So it's quite, you know, tactically calculated and fairly sophisticated for terrorism.

TERENCE SMITH:

Meanwhile, in addition to the attacks, there were, what, ten more kidnappings today in Iraq? Obviously that must be a concern to all foreigners there.

KARL VICK:

Yeah. These I don't think were chiefly westerners. I think there were Lebanese among them, and even a couple of Iraqis. But kidnapping has been a chronic problem here, generally for profit– criminal gangs who have been operating sort of below the radar here for the last 17 months since the invasion. And it's when foreigners get taken that it makes international news, but it's been going on here… the lawlessness here has been endemic ever since the fall of Saddam.

TERENCE SMITH:

Karl Vick of the Washington Post, thank you very much.

KARL VICK:

You're welcome.