My Life and Times

December 21, 2004
At Least 19 U.S. Soldiers Are Among the DeadBy RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 21 -

A powerful explosion killed at least 24 people and wounded 57 others today when it ripped through the tented dining hall of a large American military base in Mosul, tearing a foot-wide hole in the hard concrete floor and spraying shrapnel into a line where American soldiers, civilian contractors and Iraqi troops were waiting to be served lunch, military officials said.
At least 19 American servicemen were among the dead, according to Maj. Earle Bluff, a military spokesman in Baghdad, making the noontime explosion the deadliest single attack on American forces in Iraq.
Pools of blood streamed out of the darkened dining hall at Forward Operating Base Marez as soldiers rushed in to evacuate the wounded from amid crumpled and melted chairs and tables, with the only light coming from a massive hole ripped in the tent roof by the force of the blast, according to one eyewitness.
The attack was the latest in a campaign by militants to terrorize and intimidate Iraqis working either for the Iraqi security services or for American forces, and to disrupt elections planned for Jan. 30, which the militants oppose.
Speaking in Washington, President Bush offered his condolences to relatives of those killed and wounded in Mosul today, but said that the sacrifices were not in vain. "This is a very important and vital mission," Mr. Bush said outside Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he visited with soldiers wounded in Iraq. "I'm confident democracy will prevail in Iraq. I know a free Iraq will lead to a more peaceful world. So we ask for God's blessings on all who are involved in that vital mission."
The radical Islamist group Army of Ansar al-Sunna issued a statement over the Internet taking responsibility for the Mosul attack, saying one of its fighters had carried out a "martyrdom operation" against forces it described as unbelievers and occupiers. However, a United States military spokesman in Mosul said that no corpse or human remains had been found that appeared to come from a suicide bomber.
Military officials said the blast could have been caused by a well-aimed rocket or mortar round fired by insurgents outside the base. But they also cautioned that it was far too early to narrow the possibilities and that other potential causes, including a bomb smuggled onto the base, would be considered.
They said the blast was a single explosion, and that its shrapnel had created uniform perforations in metal kitchen appliances and other objects near the serving line, as if ball bearings or similar projectiles had been part of the explosive device. "The perforations were perfectly round," Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, the chief military spokesman in Mosul, said.
In the chaos of the explosion's aftermath, there was some confusion over some aspects of the casualty toll. In addition to the military deaths, the blast killed four employees and three subcontractors of Halliburton, the large Houston oil-services company that provides cafeteria and other support services to forces in Iraq, the company said. That would bring the death toll to at least 26, though a military spokesman in Mosul said he knew of only 24 confirmed deaths.
Halliburton confirmed the loss of its workers, noting that 62 of its workers had died thus far in "Iraq-Kuwait region" while working "side by side with the military and Iraqi people."
In Washington, the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, emphasized the administration's resolve to press ahead with its Iraq policy despite such attacks. "The enemies of freedom understand the stakes involved," he said. "You heard the president talk about that yesterday. They will be defeated, and a free and peaceful Iraq will emerge."
In a taped statement, the commander of American forces in northern Iraq, Brig. Gen. Carter F. Ham, said: "The killed include U.S. military personnel, U.S. contractors, foreign national contractors and Iraqi army. The wounded also come from those various groups."
"It's a sad day in Mosul," General Ham added. "But as they always do, soldiers will come back from that. And they will do what they can do best to honor those who were fallen today, and that is to see this very important mission through to a successful completion."
The focal point of the blast appeared to have been where the soldiers collected plastic folks and spoons at a stand a few feet from the long serving line, where a four-inch deep crater, about a foot wide, was blown into the thick concrete floor, said Capt. Pat Roddy.
The tiles on the floor near the serving line "were covered with so much blood you couldn't see what color the tiles were," Captain Roddy, of Fort Lewis, Wash., said in a telephone interview from Mosul. "At least 50 percent of the tables and chairs had been obliterated by shrapnel. Anybody who was sitting in there, with the magnitude of the explosion, it was large enough, it could have killed anybody."
Outside, he said, "there were half-burned boots, not attached to any soldier, and you could see blood trails coming past the concrete barriers." In the sinks outside, where soldiers washed their hands before entering the dining hall, there were "glass, parts of uniforms, watches and gloves" strewn about basins full of an inch or two of blood, he said.
The Mosul base is home to a sizable contingent of troops from Fort Lewis, in Washington State, but officials there told reporters that they had few details of the attack or how many casualties involved soldiers from the fort.
F.B.I. investigators were en route to the Mosul base tonight, and military officials were careful to not rule out any potential explanations for the blast.
"People are out there saying it was a rocket attack, but we flat out don't know that, and it could very well have not been indirect fire," said Colonel Hastings said. "It very well could have been a placed explosion."
Mosul has been the scene of frequent raids by insurgents on police stations in the past six weeks. More than 100 bodies have turned up in the city in recent weeks, as the country heads toward the elections. On Sunday, car bombers struck crowds in Najaf and Karbala, killing at least 61 people and wounding about 120 in those two holy Shiite cities. In Baghdad, about 30 insurgents hurling grenades and firing machine guns pulled three election officials from their car in the midst of morning traffic and killed them with shots to the head.
The Army of Ansar al-Sunna is regarded as a particularly brutal faction of the insurgency that has developed in strength and scope over the last several months. Among its more notable acts have been the killings, sometimes by beheading, of 11 captive Iraqi soldiers and 12 hostage truck drivers from Nepal. Ansar al-Sunna is an offshoot of Ansar al-Islam, a jihadist organization chased out of its mountain base in northern Iraq by American Special Forces and Kurdish militiamen at the start of the war in Iraq.
Today's explosion coincided with an unannounced visit to Baghdad by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who vowed that the war against the insurgents would be won and the elections held on time. Britain has some 8,000 troops in Iraq, mainly in the south of the country, centered in the city of Basra.
At a news conference in the so-called Green Zone, a fortified, heavily guarded walled compound for Iraqi government officials and foreign forces, Mr. Blair used his visit, his first to Baghdad since Saddam Hussein was toppled in spring 2003, to emphasize Britain's support for the national elections, saying the country was engaged in a "battle between democracy and terror."
Insurgents have been trying to disrupt or prevent the scheduled vote and the campaigning process by an Iraqi government that they see as collaborating with occupying foreign forces. The attacks on the Iraqi police and national guard officers have complicated plans to train enough local forces that would ideally spearhead security at polling stations.
Some Iraqi leaders have called for a postponement of the elections, saying that the continuing violence has made holding them untenable, especially in the Sunni-dominated areas north and west of Baghdad. Millions of voters would have to brave the threat of attacks by guerrillas to go to polling stations.
With the elections only six weeks away and just days into the campaigning, concern has been growing over whether the Iraqi security forces will be able to perform well enough to allow voting to proceed.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, David Stout contributed reporting from Washington, and Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York.
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