IRAQ: A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded Baghdad restaurant frequented by the security forces at breakfast time yesterday, killing 35 people and wounding 25 in an attack claimed by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
"Body parts are all over the place. We are still collecting them," a police officer at the scene said soon after the blast.
It was one of the biggest attacks in Baghdad in recent months and came a day after three hotel bombs in Jordan's capital, Amman - claimed by al-Qaeda in Iraq - killed 56 people. Security forces protecting the US-backed, Shia-led government are targets of Sunni Arab rebels and Islamist al-Qaeda groups led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Meanwhile, a car bomb at an army recruitment station in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, killed 10 people yesterday and wounded 20 more.
In the Baghdad blast, at least four Iraqi police patrols were having breakfast when the bomber, wearing an explosive vest and carrying a bag of explosives, struck, police said.
"A lion from our martyrs' brigade embedded himself among the infidel police and security forces in the restaurant," said a statement on an Islamist website used by al-Qaeda.
The statement, which could not be immediately verified, said the attack was part of an al-Qaeda campaign to avenge raids by US and Iraqi forces on suspected militant strongholds around Qaim, in western Iraq near the Syrian border.
Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari and British foreign secretary Jack Straw met in Baghdad yesterday and urged Syria to do more to stop the flow of foreign fighters east across its border.
Washington, which has 150,000 troops in Iraq, is hoping that elections on December 15th will move the country towards stability, but sectarian tensions remain and the revolt shows no sign of abating.
Suicide attacks, roadside bombs and gunmen kill dozens of people every day. Some attacks target government officials or other public figures but many others kill ordinary citizens in markets, mosques or restaurants.
Most of the victims in the suspected suicide hotel blasts in US-ally Jordan were Jordanians, even though the hotels are frequented by many foreigners, including Iraqis, travelling to and from Iraq.
Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba condemned the attacks and expressed sympathy for the victims. But, he added: "Before yesterday it's fairly clear there was some kind of sympathy for these fundamentalists in Jordan. I hope it will be a wake-up call to ordinary people about what is really going on in Iraq, so they will know the reality of the fundamentalists and terrorists," Mr Kubba told reporters.
The Shia-dominated government's relations with its Sunni Arab neighbours are strained partly because of what some Arabs see as the growing influence in Iraq of Shia, non-Arab Iran.
US and Iraqi forces have launched a series of offensives in the mainly Sunni desert province of Anbar in western Iraq near the Syrian border aimed at staunching the flow of foreign fighters and insurgents towards Baghdad.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq said the Baghdad bombing was partly in retaliation for recent operations in western Iraq such as the US-led Operation Steel Curtain in and around the town of Qusayba, during which the military said it killed 37 insurgents.
The military said that operation resumed yesterday with patrols and raids in nearby Karabilah, targeting insurgents who had fled Qusayba.
Meanwhile, a former aide of Saddam Hussein yesterday called the US-led war to disarm the Iraqi leader a "fiasco".
Dr Jafar D. Jafar, who headed Iraq's covert atomic bomb project until 1991, said it was clear from the outset that ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction was not the point of the US military campaign.
But Dr Jafar, a Saddam adviser until the 2003 invasion, also suggested that Iraq made a mistake in not fully disclosing its weapons programmes activities to UN inspectors after the first Gulf War 14 years ago.