Baghdad diner bombed

A suicide bomber who walked into a Baghdad restaurant popular with police outside the Green Zone government compound killed 23 people yesterday, the bloodiest attack in the capital for six weeks.

The al Qaeda group in Iraq led by Jordanian Abu Musab al- Zarqawi claimed the bombing as US and Iraqi troops scoured towns close to the Syrian border that they believe serve as staging posts for foreign fighters coming into the country.

The bomb went off around lunchtime just a few hundred metres from where Iraq's Parliament was meeting inside the fortified Green Zone, once Saddam Hussein's presidential palace compound. Zarqawi and his Iraqi Sunni Arab allies have declared war on the new Shi'ite-led, US-backed government.

Though US commanders say foreigners like Zarqawi account for only a small number of insurgents, they say they are behind the bloodiest attacks and blame Zarqawi for a surge in violence since the government took office in April.

Since then more than 1,000 Iraqis and some 120 US troops have been killed. But not for more than a month, since US and Iraqi forces launched Operation Lightning, a crackdown on insurgent bomb factories and other rebel activity in the city, has an attack caused so much bloodshed in central Baghdad.

The one-room, street-front restaurant was devastated, with scarcely a stick of blood-spattered furniture intact. Human remains lay on the sidewalk. Police said seven of the 23 dead were police, as were 16 of the 36 people wounded.

"Ibn Zanbour", or "Son of the Wasp", was a lively and popular halt for police and others on a strip of grill and kebab establishments along a shaded sidewalk. It lies within an outer cordon of police checkpoints set up after a series of car bombings of entrances to the Green Zone six months ago.

US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Clifford Kent said the attack fitted a pattern of attacks on police - a suicide car bomb attack killed five people elsewhere in Baghdad - and said overall violence had been reduced in the city.

"I don't think this is a setback," he said. "We know that they're still capable of carrying out attacks and we will continue to put pressure on them throughout the city."