At least 22 killed in Iraq attacks

On the same day that military spokesmen gave a rare briefing in Baghdad to announce a continued drop in overall violence, insurgents killed at least 22 people in eight attacks in Mosul and Falluja on Sunday, using roadside bombs, drive-by shootings, suicide bombers and execution-style killings, police officials said. One of the dead was a 2-month-old whose house in Falluja was hit by a hand grenade, which also wounded his parents and another child, a police official there said. In Mosul, insurgents surrounded a home where two officers of the National Police lived, shot it up, then entered and killed them, according to a police official at the Nineveh Province operations center. Police spokesmen commonly decline to be identified by name, in line with official policy. Baghdad, however, was calm after a number of recent suicide bombings. At a briefing in the new and seldom used media center in Camp Prosperity, the main American base in central Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Iraqi security forces in Baghdad, and Maj. Gen. David Perkins, top spokesman for the United States military in Iraq, both emphasized that a recent increase in spectacular attacks ran contrary to the overall norm, which they described as fewer and less effective attacks. Gone are the days when insurgents could mount coordinated attacks, sometimes involving many gunmen, General Atta said. "We have not witnessed a direct confrontation since 2007 on Iraqi security forces," he said. He put the current frequency of attacks at 20 to 25 a week, compared to 450 a week in 2007. General Perkins, while acknowledging the surge in violence beginning in April, also said that May so far had half as many attacks as last month. "From a macro point of view, the attacks trend down," he said. The deadliest attack on Sunday came in the northern city of Mosul, one of the few remaining strongholds of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leadership. A suicide bomber in a van packed with explosives appeared to be aiming at an American patrol but detonated the bomb after the patrol had moved out of range, the police official said. The blast destroyed a restaurant and several shops in the Dawasa Kharij neighborhood, killing 8 people and wounding 26, some of them critically. Elsewhere in Mosul, a roadside bomb struck an Iraqi Army patrol, killing two soldiers and wounding six others in the neighborhood of Al Zahraa. In another neighborhood, Al Andalus, gunmen ambushed and killed a university teacher near his home. And a group of gunmen surrounded a home in the Palestine neighborhood of Mosul, killing a woman and her daughter inside. The Mosul attacks all took place in daytime. In addition, the police found the bullet-riddled bodies of two men and two women, dumped overnight on a back road. At least one of the victims was a Christian, a teacher. Besides the home bombing in Falluja, the city was the site of an ambush by gunmen, of a man and his wife who were driving through the city. Falluja has been quiet for many months now, with American troops largely gone from the city.