Terrorists Use Children As Cover, Then Kill Them

General: Insurgents used kids as cover, then killed them

Story Highlights

• Insurgents blew up car with kids inside, general said
•Two journalists killed in Baghdad recently, group reports
• Hussein VP Ramadan executed in the 1982 killing of 148 men and boys in Dujail
• Car bomb kills five people outside police station in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi insurgents used two children as a cover to get through a checkpoint in Baghdad and then blew up the car while the kids were still inside, a U.S. general said Tuesday.

Two adults jumped from the car, leaving the children in the back. Moments later, the car exploded, witnesses said.

The car went through a checkpoint Sunday and parked by a market across the street from a school, said Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, deputy director for regional operations in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Watch Barbero describe how insurgents are interested only in slaughter)

The two children and three bystanders died in the blast, and seven others were hurt, Pentagon officials said.

The attack raises concerns that insurgents are trying a new tactic: using children to throw off troops, Barbero said.

"Children in the back seat lower suspicion. We let it move through," he said.

Barbero and Pentagon officials said this is the only attack of its kind they have seen.

A U.N. report released in January highlighted insurgents' use of children as suicide bombers in Iraq.

Former VP under Hussein hanged

Taha Yassin Ramadan, the former vice president under Saddam Hussein, was hanged just before dawn Tuesday, according to a source close to Iraq's High Tribunal.

Ramadan telephoned his family before the execution, and his family asked attorney Badie Aref to appeal to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and other government officials to stop the execution, Aref said.

Last month, Ramadan was sentenced to death by the Iraqi court for his role in the 1982 killings of 148 men and boys in Dujail. An appeals court upheld the sentence last week.

Ramadan was sentenced to life in prison in November on charges that included willful killing in the 1982 crackdown, but the next month, the tribunal's nine-member appeals chamber decided the original sentence was too lenient and ordered the court to resentence him.

Hussein, Hussein's half-brother, Barzan Hassan, and another official from his regime -- Awad Bandar -- also have been hanged for their roles in the Dujail crackdown.

Two Iraqi journalists killed

Two Iraqi journalists have been slain recently by armed groups in Baghdad, an international media watchdog group reported Tuesday.

The group -- Reporters Without Borders -- said 155 media staffers have been killed in Iraq since the war began four years ago.

Hamid al-Duleimi, a producer on the TV channel al-Nahrain, was found dead Monday in the Baghdad morgue after he was abducted Saturday as he left the station.

"Autopsy reports revealed that the journalist had been tortured. Two other employees of the channel were killed in May 2006 after being stopped at a fake military roadblock in the Iraqi capital," the group said.

Hussein al Jaburi, editor of the daily al-Safir, died from injuries Friday in a hospital in Amman, Jordan, Reporters Without Borders said. He was being treated after an ambush February 11 outside his house in Baghdad.

Reporters Without Borders and another media watchdog group, Committee to Protect Journalists, reported a commentator on Radio Dijla, Karim Manhal, was kidnapped outside the radio station in Baghdad with his driver, Thamir Sabri. The incident took place Saturday, the committee said. There has been no word of their whereabouts.

Other developments

• A car bomb exploded near a police station in central Baghdad, killing at least five people and wounding 17, police said. A second car bomb ripped through a commercial district in the capital's Karrada neighborhood, killing two and wounding at least seven. In southern Baghdad, a bomb was detonated inside a minibus in Mujjama al-Mishin, wounding five people.
• Two U.S. soldiers were killed in southern Baghdad Tuesday when a roadside bomb hit their unit's vehicle during a combat security patrol, the U.S. military said. The soldiers were from Multi-National Division-Baghdad. The number of U.S. military personnel killed in the four-year-old Iraq war is 3,222, including seven civilian contractors of the Defense Department.
• When American troops crossed into Iraq in 2003, nearly three out of every four Americans backed President Bush's decision to use military force to topple Hussein's regime. Four years and more than 3,200 U.S. deaths later, fewer less one-third of Americans support the war, according to the latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll. (Full story)

CNN's Ed Henry and Mohammed Tawfeeq contributed to this report.

Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/03/20/iraq.main/index.html