Bomb Attack Targets Iraq Bridge

Monthly Death Toll Drops by More Than a Third in June

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 1, 2007; 3:36 PM

BAGHDAD, July 1 -- A dump truck laden with explosives detonated on a bridge over the Euphrates River on Sunday, the latest in a series of attacks targeting Iraq's bridge network.

The 3 p.m. suicide bombing damaged a large section of the bridge, which is along the main road north of Ramadi in the western province of Anbar. Two civilians were injured and evacuated to a hospital, according to U.S. military officials.

Since April, when bombers destroyed a large portion of Baghdad's historic Sarafiya bridge over the Tigris River, attackers have systematically taken out bridges in and around the capital, clogging up traffic and isolating neighborhoods. In early June, insurgents damaged the Sarha bridge on a main route from Baghdad to northern Iraq.

After the explosion Sunday in Anbar, cars were still able to pass on what is one of the major thoroughfare's through the province to Iraq's border with Jordan.

An hour earlier, a second suicide attack involving a dump truck targeted a police checkpoint in Fallujah, which is also in Anbar. Police first tried to get the truck to pull over, then "engaged the truck causing it to detonate," 2nd Lt. Roger A. Hollenbeck, a U.S. Marine spokesman, said in an e-mail.

The blast killed one police officer and injured four others, he said.

The violence came amid reports that the number of Iraqi civilians killed in June dropped by more than a third from the previous month, at a time when the full complement of additional U.S. troops are now conducting operations.

News services reported that 1,227 civilians died violently in June, a 36 percent decrease from May and the lowest monthly total since the Baghdad security plan started in mid-February. The figure was provided by the Iraqi ministries of interior, defense and health, according to the news services. Iraqi state television reported the same death toll.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Abdul Kareem Khalaf, said that he did not know whether the death toll was correct and that no one from the Interior Ministry was authorized to release fatality figures.

At least 101 U.S. soldiers were killed in June, the third-straight month in which American casualties reached more than 100 and the highest quarterly death toll since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an independent Web site.

Establishing the number of civilians killed in Iraq is difficult because there is no reliable or transparent system to track the figures. The United Nations Assistance Mission used to provide periodic statistics on civilian casualties but did not include the death tolls in its last human rights report in April because the Iraqi government failed to provide them.

"We have no way of determining the veracity of these figures," said Said Arikat, a U.N. spokesman in Baghdad. "We call on the government to release those figures to us. I think it's important for Iraq and important for the government of Iraq."

Special correspondent Naseer Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.