A car bomb went off on Thursday as a bus carrying state employees passed by in the town of Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, killing four people and injuring 24, a police source said.
This latest attack came as Major General William Caldwell , chief spokesman for US forces in Iraq, said on Wednesday murders and executions in Baghdad had been halved in the past month but that "sensational" car bombs blamed on al Qaeda and other Sunni groups had spiked in February. According to Reuters, he said U.S. forces were focusing their efforts on finding car bomb factories believed to be on the outskirts of Baghdad and in the beltway around it.
Meanwhile, a quarterly Pentagon report said that last October through December was the most violent three-month period since 2003. Attacks and casualties suffered by coalition and Iraqi forces and civilians were higher than any other similar time span, said the report, cited by the AP.
Most of the data in the Pentagon's 42-page report is before US President Bush ordered an additional 21,500 troops and thousands of support personnel to Baghdad. The report cautions that it should be considered "a baseline from which to measure future progress."
And it added, "Some elements of the situation in Iraq are properly descriptive of a 'civil war,' including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities and mobilization, the changing character of the violence and population displacements."
