Bombing of Iraq army recruits kills 12

HILLA, Iraq, Aug 30 (Reuters) A bomb apparently left on a parked bicycle blasted a crowd of young Iraqi men outside an army recruiting office early today, killing 12 people and wounding 38, police said.

Hilla provincial police spokesman Captain Muthanna al-Mamuri said the bicycle appeared to have been left early in the morning, laden with an explosive package, close to the office in the centre of Hilla, 100 km south of Baghdad.

It went off around 8 a m (0430 hrs IST), when a crowd had gathered. It followed several days of heavy bloodshed outside the capital. US and Iraq troops have mounted a major security crackdown in Baghdad itself.

Recruitment centres for the Iraqi army and police, key elements of Washington's strategy for pulling out its own troops, have been frequent targets for insurgents from the Sunni Arab minority, including al Qaeda Islamists, who oppose the rise of the Shi'ite Muslim majority in US-backed elections.

The mainly Shi'ite city of Hilla, close to the site of ancient Babylon, is surrounded by Sunni rural areas.

It has seen some of the deadliest sectarian bomb attacks over the past two years, including the bloodiest single blast in Iraq, when 125 people, many of them police recruits, were killed by a suicide car bomber in February 2005.

US and Iraqi officials say the security crackdown in Baghdad is having an effect, with the murder rate down by half this month over last, when dozens of people a day were being killed in the capital alone, pitching Iraq closer to civil war.

The national unity government of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki still faces a major task in building up its security forces to take over from some 150,000 mainly American troops.

A suicide car bomber killed 13 police outside the Interior Ministry building in Baghdad on Monday.

Underlining the range of threats to stability, Shi'ite militiamen and Iraqi troops fought an intense battle in Diwaniya, 180 km (110 miles) south of Baghdad, leaving at least 30 people dead by official accounts, and possibly dozens more.

In scattered violence yesterday, two American soldiers were killed and police found the bodies of 20 victims of apparent sectarian death squads in Baghdad. Ten of the bodies were close to a school. In the violent city of Baquba, northeast of the capital, 15 people were shot dead in various attacks.

Iraq's economy is crippled by the violence, causing among other things an acute shortage of fuel in a country with the world's third largest reserves of crude oil.

Scavengers were caught by an explosion at a ruptured gasoline pipeline near Diwaniya late on Monday. At least 29 were killed, hospital officials said, but the death toll could be more than twice that, they added, because more than 30 people had been reported as missing.

REUTERS SY KN1106