Bombings Across Iraq Kill More Than 50 People
Government Puts Insurgents' Trial on TV
By Ellen Knickmeyer and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Foreign ServiceTuesday,
May 24, 2005; Page A01

BAGHDAD, May 23 -- Bombings targeting U.S. and Iraqi forces and Shiite Arab civilians at worship, at lunch, at home and on the road killed more than 50 people across Iraq on Monday, officials said, heightening sectarian tensions and taking the death toll past 600 since a new government was installed less than a month ago.

Iraq's Shiite-led administration, meanwhile, tried to portray itself as taking control of security. Iraqi television aired extended broadcasts of the trial of three accused insurgents facing the death penalty, and a new music video introduced on state TV featured Abul Waleed, commander of a feared police commando unit, saying: "We will cut off the arms" of terrorists.

The U.S. military reported the deaths of five American troops Sunday -- three killed in two attacks in Mosul and a fourth killed in a car bombing in Tikrit, north of Baghdad. Another soldier died in a vehicle accident near Kirkuk, the military said.

Monday's violence followed a lull in bombings that lasted several days and the first significant overtures this weekend by Sunni Arab leaders to end a Sunni boycott of politics that had lasted more than two years.

Iraq's disgruntled Sunni minority, which long dominated the country's political and military leadership but was ousted from power along with Saddam Hussein in early 2003, has been at the forefront of the insurgency. Americans and Iraqis have hoped that drawing Sunnis into the new political process would quell the violence, but the issue remains unresolved. Insurgent attacks have intensified since the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari took office at the end of April.>>>continued

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