Iraq mourns 60 bomb victims as US reviews tactics

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http://www.khaleejtimes.ae/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/focusoniraq/2006/December/focusoniraq_December13.xml§ion=focusoniraq

BAGHDAD - Shell-shocked Baghdadis on Sunday sifted through the bloody wreckage from the latest deadly bomb attack on their city, as the United States sought a new strategy to pull Iraq back from the abyss.

The death toll from Saturday’s triple car bombing rose to 60 overnight as more men, women and children succumbed to wounds suffered when the blasts ripped through a crowded shopping street at nightfall, medics said.

After more than three-and-a-half years of mounting sectarian conflict, the attack, while vicious, was neither unexpected nor especially deadly; more than 3,700 Iraqi civilians were slaughtered in November alone.

But each new massacre hammers a wedge deeper between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities and chips away at the credibility of the country’s beleaguered unity government and the US-led coalition force propping it up.

The bombers were back at work Sunday, when an insurgent wearing an explosive belt detonated himself next to a police station in near the northern oil city of Kirkuk, killing three officers, Major General Torhan Yussef told AFP.

American soldiers killed six suspected insurgents, two women and a child when they called in an air strike to dislodge gunmen from a safehouse west of Baghdad late Saturday, the US military said in a statement.