A suicide bomber killed 12 people in a minibus transporting Iraqi army recruits today, as al Qaeda said in a video on the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks that US forces in Iraq were "doomed" to fail.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will make his first official visit to neighbouring, Shia Iran tomorrow, a day later than originally planned, an aide said.
Most of the dead in the blast were young recruits who had boarded a public minibus outside the Muthanna base in central Baghdad, which has been targeted in the past by insurgents from the Sunni Arab minority, including al Qaeda Islamists, who oppose the US-backed Shia-led coalition government.
Recruiting centres are key to Washington's plan to withdraw troops suffering daily losses. At least 2,669 U.S. troops have died since the 2003 invasion, which Washington said was partly a response to purported ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the war, which Washington also said it waged to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were never found.
As Americans marked the anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington, Ayman al-Zawahri, Deputy al Qaeda leader, said in remarks apparently addressed to Western leaders: "I tell them do not bother yourselves with defending your forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. These forces are doomed to failure."
Thousands of miles away from New York's Ground Zero, where hijackers crashed two airliners into the twin towers, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad told a ceremony in Baghdad that there was "no alternative to a successful Iraq". A recent Pentagon report warned that civil war is a possibility in Iraq.
Repeating Washington's view that a "stable and non-sectarian democracy" in Iraq was part of a U.S. strategy to stamp out extremism from the Middle East, Khalilzad said:"Any other outcome will embolden al Qaeda and extremists and produce new tragedies and the repetition of old ones like 9/11".
The Washington Postdisclosed a US Marines report that officials said concluded US forces had effectively lost the vast desert province of Anbar, leaving a vacuum for al Qaeda.
With an eye on the eventual withdrawal of the 155,000 mostly US foreign troops from Iraq, the US military last week handed over formal command of Iraq's army to Mr Maliki, who is struggling to avert a slide into all-out civil war.
Shoes and tattered clothes lay amid the mangled wreckage of the bus, where the suicide bomber detonated his explosive belt after boarding near the base. A roadside bomb targeting U.S. soldiers killed three civilians in western Baghdad.