Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News Staff

BAGHDAD, 12 February 2004 — A second devastating suicide attack in as many days killed up to 47 people yesterday, pushing the toll in the back-to-back attacks to 100. Again, Iraqis were the targets — this time a crowd of volunteers for Iraq’s new army — in bombings that appear part of a campaign to wreck US plans to transfer power by June 30.

The US military put a $10 million bounty on the head of a Jordanian militant who may be organizing violence by foreign fighters and plotting an acceleration in attacks aimed at sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq.

The United States made public a letter to Al-Qaeda leaders thought to be sent by the militant, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. In it, he warns that militants are in a “race against time” to stop the handover of power to Iraqis, when Iraqi security forces are due to take a stronger role in battling the insurgency. The military announced Monday that it intercepted the document.

In yesterday’s attack in Baghdad, an Oldsmobile packed with 135-225 kilograms (300 to 500 pounds) of explosives drove up to a crowd of Iraqis waiting for an army recruitment center to open — only a few blocks from the edge of the heavily fortified green zone, where the US administration has its headquarters.

The driver detonated the vehicle, killing 47 people and wounding 55, the US-led coalition said. The Iraqi Interior Ministry put the toll at 46 dead.

The day before, a truck carrying a similar amount of explosives blew up outside a police station in the mostly Shiite town of Iskandariya, south of the capital, killing 55 Iraqis, including would-be recruits lined up to apply for jobs in the police force.

There was no claim of responsibility for the rare consecutive attacks. Some military officials in Baghdad said they could be linked to Al-Zarqawi. “If I could draw on a relationship to his memo and also these attacks...’yes,’ they are related,” Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, said yesterday.

“Iskandariya is right on the line between Sunnis and Shiites, so the attack there might be trying to foment some kind of civil war,” Swannack said.

A US official in Washington said Al-Zarqawi’s involvement could not be ruled out, but that the blasts were more likely the work of supporters of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. “They view police in training to be collaborators with the US,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Mohsen Abdel-Hamid, president of the US-appointed Governing Council, said the attackers “want to undermine security so that independence will be delayed.” The frequency of attacks may also be a “message” to a UN team of experts currently in Iraq to assess whether an early election can be held before the transfer of power, he told a press conference.

Yesterday’s was at least the ninth major vehicle bombing in Iraq this year, and US officials say that as the June 30 deadline nears more attacks will likely follow.

US coalition officials have portrayed the letter from Al-Zarqawi as a sign of insurgents’ desperation to stop the handover. The letter’s author complained that Iraqi guerrillas have not cooperated enough with foreign fighters and said attacks would be tougher to carry out once Iraqi security forces take a more prominent role.

“The noose is beginning to tighten around the necks of the mujahedeen, and the future is frightening with the future deployment of more troops and police,” he wrote. If the insurgency fails to prevent the handover, “then there will be no choice but to pack our bags and move to another land.”

He outlines a strategy of kidnappings of US soldiers and greater attacks on “collaborators,” Kurds and particularly Shiites, saying “the best solution” is to spark war between Iraq’s Shiites and Sunni minority.

Insurgents have mounted a string of car and suicide bombings in recent weeks — the deadliest so far in the northern city of Arbil on Feb. 1, when two suicide bombers blew themselves up at two Kurdish party offices, killing at least 109 people.

— Additional input from agencies