More than a dozen gunmen launched an assault on a Baghdad police station early yesterday, wounding two policemen and causing some damage to the building, officials said.
About 15 assailants in three cars opened fire at the station in Baghdad's Aamil neighborhood, police 1st Lieutenant Thaar Mahmoud said. The gunbattle lasted about 20 minutes, he said.
Insurgents have in recent weeks mostly targeted the Iraqi security forces at the forefront of government counterinsurgency operations -- both in an effort to shatter their morale and prevent recruits from signing up.
Sunni Arabs make up the core of Iraq's insurgency, and the minority has felt politically embittered by the rise of the Shiites and the Kurds -- two communities that account for about 80 percent of the country's estimated 26 million people. Many Sunni Arabs boycotted January's historic elections.
Elsewhere, a roadside bomb exploded near a US patrol north of Baqouba, causing no damage or injuries, police Colonel Ali al-Timimi said. Baqouba is 60km northeast of Baghdad.
The number of insurgent attacks has escalated since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his Shiite-led government on April 28. At least 1,189 people have been killed since then, according to an Associated Press count based on military, police and hospital reports.
Meanwhile, a US military operation in western Iraq uncovered three car bomb factories and 17 car bombs, said a statement released yesterday from the Multi-National Force Combined Press Center.
The discoveries came Monday and the bombs, which included a tractor trailer, a dump truck and a van, were destroyed on the spot by US Marines.
Also found were nine foreign passports, from Sudan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Libya.
Operation "Romhe" (Spear) began early Friday in and around Karabilah, close to the Syrian border in Iraq's western al-Anbar province.
In related news, a 40-year-old man was arrested yesterday in northern England in connection with suicide bomb attacks on US-led coalition forces in Iraq, police said.
Around 30 officers detained the man in a dawn raid on a house in the Moss Side area of Manchester.
Greater Manchester Police said the operation was not connected to any threat in Britain but to "an incident overseas" involving attacks in Iraq.
They explained that the case involved two suspects -- one who used to live at the raided house before he travelled to Iraq to take part in a suicide bombing and the other whom the police arrested in the dawn sweep.
"Since the beginning of the year, there have been a series of suicide bombings against coalition forces in Iraq," a police spokesman said. "It appears that one of the suicide bombers may have travelled from the UK where he had been living."
No further details were available about the identity or nationality of the arrested man, but the spokesman was keen to emphasize that it was unrelated to a risk of violence in Britain.
Thousands of Iraqi civilians and members of the country's security forces as well as hundreds of US soldiers and scores more from Britain and other coalition countries have been killed in suicide attacks, bombings and shootings since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
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