Rapid-fire attacks across Iraq kill 55 people

A rapid series of attacks spread over a wide swath of Iraq killed at least 55 people today, targetting mostly security forces in what Iraqi officials called "frantic attempts" by insurgents to show civilians that their country was doomed to violence for years to come.

The apparently coordinated bombings and shootings unfolded over hours in the capital Baghdad, where most of the deaths occurred, and 11 other cities. They struck government offices, restaurants and one in the town of Musayyib hit close to a primary school. At least 225 people were wounded.

If the insurgents' goal was to show Iraqis how precarious their situation is, it appeared to be working.

"What is happening today are not simple security violations, it is a huge security failure and disaster," said Ahmed al-Tamimi, who was working at an Education Ministry office a block away from a restaurant that was bombed in the Shiite neighbourhood of Kazimiyah in northern Baghdad. He described a hellish scene of human flesh and pools of blood at the restaurant.

"We want to know: What were the thousands of policemen and soldiers in Baghdad doing today while the terrorists were roaming the city and spreading violence?" al-Tamimi said.

It was the latest of a series of large-scale attacks that insurgents have launched every few weeks since the last US troops left Iraq in mid-December at the end of a nearly nine-year war.

The Interior Ministry blamed al-Qaida insurgents for the violence.

"These attacks are part of frantic attempts by the terrorist groups to show that the security situation in Iraq will not ever be stable," the ministry said in a statement.

"These attacks are part of al-Qaida efforts to deliver a message to its supporters that al-Qaida is still operating inside Iraq, and it has the ability to launch strikes inside the capital or other cities and towns," it said.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the latest attacks, but targetting security officials is a hallmark of al-Qaida. Such violence achieves two goals: undermining the public's confidence in the ability of their policemen and soldiers to protect everyday citizens, and discouraging people from joining or helping the security forces.

The ongoing nature of the violence and the fact that insurgents are able to launch a variety of attacks over a wide territory in Iraq shows the country is still deeply unstable, despite government assurances it could protect itself when American troops left in December.

The violence points to a dangerous gap in the abilities of the Iraqi security forces that had particularly worried the departing US military: their ability to gather intelligence on insurgent groups and stop them before they launch deadly attacks.

Gathering information on militants and their networks was a key area in which the US military helped their Iraqi counterparts.