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Up to 24 dead in Iraq as insurgents press on

A suicide bomber killed up to 20 people including five policemen and many plain-clothes security guards at a Baghdad restaurant close to the Green Zone government compound yesterday, several police sources said.

A further 20 were wounded after the bomber walked into the restaurant during lunchtime on a street protected by numerous police checkpoints and a few hundred meters from one of the main public entrances to the fortified Green Zone.

Meanwhile, a suicide car bomber killed four and wounded 12 in a strike on an Iraqi military checkpoint north of Baghdad yesterday as insurgents showed no signs of slackening their onslaught despite two major US offensives aimed at routing foreign fighters.

Marines and Iraqi soldiers battled insurgents as part of Operation Spear, in its third day in the desert town of Karabilah, an outpost in western Anbar province near the Syrian border.

Troops fired Hellfire missiles overnight at two homes where insurgents holed up after shooting mortars at coalition forces, said Lieutenant Colonel Tim Mundy, who commands the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment. The military said they believed four or five militants may have been killed in the counterattack.

Intelligence officials believe Anbar province is a portal used by extremist groups, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorist group, to smuggle in foreign fighters. Syria is under intense pressure from Washington and Baghdad to tighten control of its porous 612km border with Iraq.

On Thursday, a US general called Syria's border the "worst problem" in terms of stemming the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq.

The majority of the region's residents are Sunni Muslims, who are thought to make up the core of an insurgency that has killed at least 1,115 people since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's Shiite-led government was announced April 28.
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