Published Date: November 26, 2008

BAGHDAD: Three explosions rocked Baghdad yesterday, killing 19 people two days before parliament was to vote on a divisive military pact under which all US troops would leave Iraq by the end of 2011. One of the blasts was caused by a female suicide bomber who detonated her explosives vest at the entrance to Baghdad's heavily-guarded Green Zone, brutally underscoring the lingering violence in the Iraqi capital. In the first attack 13 people were killed-nine of them women when a roadside bomb exploded near a
bus carrying trade ministry employees during the morning commute in east Baghdad, a medical official at a nearby hospital said.

The medic said most of the victims were incinerated inside the bus, and that five other people were wounded. Less than an hour later five people were killed when the suicide bomber blew herself up in a corridor leading into the Green Zone, where dozens of Iraqi employees were queuing to pass through security checkpoints, police said. Another 17 people were wounded in the rush-hour attack, which echoed across central Baghdad and sent a pillar of black smoke into the air. In another attack in east Baghdad, a
roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed a civilian and wounded five others, including three policemen.

The Green Zone blast splashed blood and seared flesh across the grey concrete barriers at the entrance, according to an AFP correspondent. US and Iraqi forces closed the entrance and ordered bystanders to leave the area, forcing employees to wait hundreds of meters away. "I heard a guard shouting before the explosion. He was yelling at a woman to back off," a policeman who was near the scene of the blast said.

An official from the Iraqi intelligence services said the blast targeted the entrance to a corridor of checkpoints leading to their headquarters. "Two women employees of the intelligence services were killed and six guards were wounded in the attack this morning," he said, adding that one of the women was pregnant. The Green Zone houses Iraq's parliament and several government offices and foreign embassies. It was last attacked on October 7, when two powerful blasts went off just outside the area, wounding
an Iraqi soldier and six civilians.

Iraq has seen significant improvements in security over the past year as US and Iraqi forces have allied with local tribal militias to drive insurgents out of large swathes of the country that used to be engulfed in violence. But bombings targeting security forces are still common in the capital and other restive areas of the country. In the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk, Khalaf Al-Jaburi, a Sunni tribal leader, was gunned down outside his home in the city centre, police said. The ethnically diverse cit
y has been at the heart of a conflict brewing between Iraq's central government and its Kurdish minority, who would like to expand their northern autonomous region to include Kirkuk.

The latest attacks came as Iraq's parliament was mulling a controversial security pact that would have US forces withdraw from all Iraqi cities by the end of June 2009 and from the country as a whole by the end of 2011. Iraq's cabinet approved the pact-the product of nearly a year of intensive negotiations-more than a week ago, but the accord has drawn fire from hardline nationalists who have demanded that US troops leave sooner. The Iraq government has urged parliament to approve the agreement, which woul
d govern the more than 150,000 US troops deployed in over 400 bases across Iraq when their current UN mandate expires on December 31. Parliament is expected to vote on the pact on Wednesday. - AFP