Insurgency Kills Two Iraq-Namese MPs with Bomb in Parliament Cafeteria

Yesterday, a bomb went off in the cafeteria of the Iraq-Namese parliament building, the former Baghdad convention center. Iraq-Namese lawmaker Mohammed Awadh died, and several more were injured. Initial reports say it was a suicide attack, but that hasn’t been proven. What has been demonstrated is the ability of the insurgents to strike even at the heart of the allegedly secure Green Zone in Baghdad. The security arrangement there has been deeply heavily infiltrated by those seeking to bring down the regime.

National Dialogue Front MP Mohammed al-Dayni said on Iraq-Nam’s Sharqiya television [Translation from MSNBC], “I am standing now at the site of the explosion and looking at the severed legs of the person who carried out the operation. If this tells us anything, it tells us that security is lax.”

Khalaf al-Ilyan, of the Iraqi Accordance Front, a Sunni Islamist faction, said from Jordan where he recently had knee surgery, the bombing was “aimed at everyone — all parties — our parliament in general being a symbol and a representative of all segments of Iraqi society.” The attack “underlines the failure of the government’s security plan. The plan is 100 percent a failure. It’s a complete flop. The explosion means that instability and lack of security has reached the Green Zone, which the government boasts is heavily fortified.”

Sam Knight in Britain’s newspaper The Times reported, “The attacker would have had to bypass several checkpoints and metal detectors, both at the entrance to the Green Zone and then at the parliament building, to bring an explosive device into the convention centre. Inspections are usually so rigorous that visitors to the building have to take the battery out of their mobile phone to show that it is not dangerous. Witnesses said that sniffer dogs had been added to the security measures this morning, a rare precaution that suggested there were fears of a terrorist attack. On April 1, US troops discovered two suicide vests inside the Green Zone.”

The US “surge” in Baghdad has entered its ninth week, and the US government claims that the US is making progress in securing parts of the capital. That may well be. However, the ability of the insurgency to strike the parliament building in such a way suggests that the progress seen in Washington is irrelevant to the actual situation. The Pentagon has just announced that tours of duty in Iraq-Nam will be extended from 12 to 15 months. Given the failure of the local security services at the very heart of the Green Zone, there’s no point to that.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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