Another car bomb in Baghdad. But this time it wasn't aimed at a US military patrol. Its seemingly unlikely target: the Moutassim Primary School.
Car bombs, rockets and machine gun fire have ripped through dozens of classrooms across Iraq, putting schools that are to be used as polling stations on the front line of insurgents' efforts to derail yesterday's landmark elections.
PHOTO: AP
The bomb that exploded on Friday in Baghdad shaved off the concrete facade of the Moutassim school and blew away its fence. Students were not in class at the time, but the sight of his school in ruins brought 10-year-old Maysoun Khalid to tears.
"It's my school. I was really affected when I saw it all smashed up," the fourth-grader said.
The strikes have claimed few casualties since students have been on a midterm vacation for two weeks. But they indicate that insurgents have gathered an accurate picture of election day plans despite efforts to keep voting sites secret until just before the vote. Authorities have started announcing locally where the polling sites will be.
Some Iraqi officials complained that schools were chosen as voting sites when authorities knew that could make them targets. Insurgents have promised in leaflets and other messages to "wash the streets" with voters' blood.
"It's wrong to use schools as polling centers because for sure these centers will be attacked, and that will affect the education of our students," said Sabah Naief, a local education official in the central city of Samarra.
About 50 schools have been damaged in Salaheddin province alone, provincial Governor Hamad al-Qaisy said. The volatile province includes Samarra and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.
Ten principals there refused to allow their schools to be used as voting sites, he said.
In the insurgent-plagued western Anbar province, school principal Saadi Abid refused to let authorities set up voting booths at his junior high school in the city of Ramadi, where voter turnout is expected to be light because of fears of violence and calls from Sunni Muslim clerics for a boycott.
"I will not let them risk my pupils' future by taking my school and then having the insurgents destroy it," he said.
The exact cost of the attacks is not known, but they are whittling away at millions of dollars that was poured into reconstruction projects to repair the country's aging schools. In September, the US Army Corps of Engineers said more than US$900 million was to go toward renovating 1,200 schools and 150 hospitals and clinics.
Election commission official Safwat Rashid said damage from the attacks has been minor.
Some officials said they feared the sight of schools barricaded with concrete blast barriers and coils of razor wire meant to protect voters could traumatize students.
An exact figure for how many schools have been hit or how many people have been killed in the attacks was not available.
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