Iraqi police thwarted a triple suicide attack on Baghdad's Green Zone government compound today by shooting dead two bombers and and capturing a third, the US military said.
Police said the attack, claimed by al-Qaeda's Iraq wing, involved a car bomber followed up by two bombers on foot. The target was a checkpoint guarded by Iraqi troops and police and used by civilians arriving for work at the fortified complex.
US soldiers cordon off the site of an attempted suicide bombing in Baghdad
Police guarding the checkpoint spotted what they identified as a suicide bomber driving towards them during the morning rush hour, a US spokesman said. They opened fire, and the bomb went off before reaching the checkpoint.
Two other bombers, strapped with explosives, then ran toward them but were gunned down. One survived and, after an Iraqi explosives expert defused his bomb, was taken into custody.
It was a rare success for the security forces against a campaign of daily attacks that has killed perhaps 1,500 people in three months.
US commanders are keen for new Iraqi forces to take over the burden of fighting the insurgency to let Americans go home.
Most suicide bombers are believed to be young men, many of them foreign, whose religious allegiance to the likes of al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has been allied to the insurgency among Iraq's Sunni Arab minority which appears to be directed in part by loyalists from Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime.