The bombings came hours after clashes in the Baghdad area killed three U.S. soldiers overnight, and a day after insurgents devastated a hotel full of U.S. occupation officials with a rocket barrage, killing a U.S. colonel and wounding 18 other people.
It was two days of violence unprecedented in this city of 5 million people since the end of the U.S.-Iraq war last April, attacks aimed at the American-led occupation and those perceived as working with it.
''We feel helpless when see this,'' a distraught Iraqi doctor said at the devastated Red Cross offices. ...
At the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross in central Baghdad, witnesses said a suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed vehicle, apparently an ambulance, right up to security barriers outside the building at about 8:30 a.m. and detonated it, blowing down the Red Cross's front wall, devastating the interior and blowing shrapnel and debris over a wide area.
Through the morning, four other vehicles exploded at police stations in the Baghdad area. Ambulances, sirens wailing, crisscrossed the city all morning.
[But] Iraqi police reported some 27 people killed at police stations, including 15 Iraqis at the ad-Doura station in southern Baghdad. One U.S. soldier was among them, said Lt. Sarmad al-Hakim, an ad-Doura officer. ...
At a fifth police station in central Baghdad, officers stopped a suicide bomber before he could detonate his Land Cruiser. ''He was shouting, `Death to the Iraqi police! You're collaborators!''' said police Sgt. Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
