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41 U.S. soldiers injured in explosion

By Atul Aneja

MANAMA Dec. 9. Nearly 41 American troops and six Iraqi civilians were injured when a suicide bomber blew up a car laden with explosives this morning near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which is fast becoming a key stronghold of the Iraqi resistance.

In a separate incident, three American soldiers died in a road accident in central Iraq.

The bombing of the military base in Talafar, 48 km from Mosul, took place after a car drove up to the gates of the camp. It exploded when security guards at the gate and from a watchtower opened fire at it. Four of the injured were taken to hospital while others suffered lighter wounds from flying glass and falling debris.

Later on Tuesday, the U.S. military said a suicide bomber had blown himself up outside a U.S. Army compound near Baghdad, lightly injuring two soldiers.

The attack at the army base comes amid a series of strikes, which have rocked Mosul and its surroundings. Once being projected by the U.S. occupation forces as a model of post-war stability and reconstruction, Mosul has become one of the major centres of the Iraqi resistance. Seventeen U.S. soldiers were killed on November 15 in the city when two Black Hawk helicopters collided over its skies and crashed after one of them was struck by Iraqi ground fire.

Eight days later, two U.S. soldiers were slain in mysterious circumstances when their convoy was stuck in traffic. U.S. authorities however denied some eyewitness accounts that the throats of the two soldiers had been slit. Sustaining their attacks in Mosul, Iraqi resistance fighters killed one American solider and wounded three others by exploding a roadside bomb on December 7, a day after the visit to Iraq by the U.S. Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Iraqi guerillas have also consistently attacked people seen as collaborating with the American occupation in Mosul, which include policemen, an oil-field security official and a judge. Samarra, north of Baghdad, is also showing increasing signs of restiveness following a recent clash between U.S. troops and Iraqi fighters.

On Saturday, railway officials reported that 20 train carriages were derailed when a bomb detonated on the track near the town. The growing resistance has continued to propel an exodus of diplomats, aid workers and technicians. On Tuesday, the Ambassador of Bangladesh to Iraq and his staff reportedly left the country. On Sunday, a week after the deaths of two of their colleagues, the remaining 60 South Korean engineers and technicians working on a U.S. government backed power project decided to leave Iraq.

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