Six months to the day after Saddam Hussein's regime fell, the elusive, unseen forces who are blighting the US occupation struck yesterday, killing at least nine Iraqis, a Spanish diplomat and a US serviceman.
The violence was the worst in Baghdad since August 19th, when a suicide bomber killed 22 people at the UN headquarters in Iraq. At least one suicide bomber drove a grey Oldsmobile into a police station on traffic circle 55, on the edge of Baghdad's largest Shia Muslim neighbourhood, Sadr City. The attack was staged before 9 a.m., as policemen reporting for duty stood to attention in the courtyard.
Witnesses said the car approached the site at high speed, going the wrong way down a one-way street. A guard who opened fire on the bomber was mowed down. The vehicle collided with a parked police car and exploded, scattering body parts up to 20 metres away.
"I saw the head of the bomber on the roof of the building," said Mr Rassoul Oglah, an Iraqi journalist. "He was young, in his 20s, and wore a beard." Police Lieut Sermad Hamed said the bomber "was either from the Fedayeen Saddam or the Wahabis". The Fedayeen Saddam militia were created by the dictator's late son Uday to protect the regime. Wahabis are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims whose ideology is close to that of Osama bin Laden.
"It's revenge against us for working with the Americans, and it's an attack on the Shia," Lieut Hamed continued. Because of its location, most of the policemen stationed at circle 55 are Shia, viewed by the Wahabis as heretics. Five of the dead were policemen. The other four were construction workers who were refurbishing the station as part of the US plan to rehabilitate the Iraqi police force. US troops arrived shortly after the explosion but when they approached the offices of the radical Shia cleric Sheikh Muqtada al-Sadr, residents of the neighbourhood threw stones at them and they departed.
An imam loyal to Sheikh Muqtada is imprisoned by the US, and his Jesh al Mahdi militia held a demonstration in Sadr City late yesterday. After every attack on Shias, the militia parades with weapons, saying it will defend the community.
About the same time the police station was blown up, three gunmen knocked on the front door of Mr Jose Antonio Burnal Gomez, a military attaché at the Spanish embassy here. The killers told Mr Gomez' bodyguard they would shoot him if he intervened. Mr Gomez ran into the street and was shot in the head. His murder marks the first assassination of a Western diplomat in Iraq. Spain has contributed 1,300 troops to the coalition force.
A US serviceman was wounded when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at a convoy near Baqouba, north-east of Baghdad. He died in hospital, bringing to 92 the number of Americans killed in combat in Iraq since President Bush declared major combat was over on May 1st.