Bombs took a bloody toll Wednesday, killing 13 Iraqis and a U.S. soldier, but military officials reported a sharp fall off in attacks during the past year -- a decline reflected in a steep decrease in violent deaths tallied by the Associated Press. In Wednesday's worst violence, a suicide car bomber killed eight civilians and wounded 41 people in an attack on a military convoy carrying a senior Iraqi commander in the northern city of Mosul, the Iraqi military said. The commander was unharmed.
Decreasing violence has been attributed mainly to the 2007 U.S. troop surge, a Sunni revolt against Al-Qaida in Iraq and government crackdowns on Sunni extremists and Shiite militias. An average of 25 attacks took place each day last month, compared with 160 during June 2007. Meanwhile, an Associated Press count showed the number of Iraqi civilians and security personnel killed in June was down 66 percent from the same month a year earlier, dropping to 554 from 1,642.
The second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq said Wednesday he is preparing for the possibility that insurgents will try to spoil Iraq's expected October provincial elections by stepping up violence. Army Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin III said they attempted to do that but failed in previous balloting periods in Iraq. "That's certainly one of the things that we feel could happen [and] one of the things we take into account as we do our planning."
Police in Ramadi, in Anbar Province west of Baghdad, said workers rebuilding a primary school had discovered 22 bodies, most of them under concrete in a playing field. Relatives of missing people were summoned to the site. Those identified included a Muslim cleric whose wife recognized his clothes, a police official said. Ramadi was a stronghold of the Sunni-led insurgency, but violence there has dropped since Sunni tribal leaders and their fighters formed an alliance with the U.S. military.
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