Guards foil female suicide bomber, but other Iraqis die in mounting sectarian bloodshed

BAGHDAD — Alert guards gunned down a black-clad woman at a police recruiting station Tuesday, a would-be suicide bomber who then exploded before their eyes. But another bomber succeeded, killing at least 15 people at a gathering of tribal leaders opposed to al-Qaida in the volatile Anbar province.

The attack in Anbar comes as al-Qaida-linked militants find themselves increasingly engaged in violent battles against more moderate Sunni insurgents. Despite the fighting within sectarian groups, the U.S. commander here acknowledged violence between Sunnis and Shiites is on the rise.

Meanwhile, the U.S. command insisted it would continue the search for two abducted U.S. soldiers despite the release of a video Monday by insurgents linked to al-Qaida claiming they had killed the two, along with a third missing soldier whose body was found previously.

The command's attitude was reflected in the field.

"It really doesn't change a thing," said Capt. Aaron Bright, a 10th Mountain Division company commander whose men have spent many days on the search since the soldiers were seized in an ambush south of Baghdad on May 12. Four other American soldiers and an Iraqi were killed in that attack.

"We're still going to continue our search and we're never going to stop until they're found. We'll continue to assume they're alive," Bright said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The insurgent video displayed the two missing soldiers' identification cards. "The Americans sent 4,000 soldiers looking for them," an unidentified voice said. "They were alive and then dead." It offered no proof.

Among the attacks Tuesday, gunmen assassinated a local leader of Muqtada al-Sadr's radical Shiite Muslim faction south of Baghdad, and to the north insurgents ambushed an Iraqi army vehicle, killing an undetermined number of soldiers.

As the sun rose, reports also began filtering in of headless corpses and other bodies found dumped around Iraq, many presumed victims of the relentless Shiite-against-Sunni bloodshed.

In an interview with CBS television, Gen. David Petraeus, overall U.S. commander in Iraq, noted that the number of sectarian killings had fallen off after the "surge" of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops began in February, an effort to restore order in Baghdad and nearby areas. But the number rose in May, he acknowledged.

"What all of the commanders on the ground have said repeatedly is that this is going to get harder before it gets easier," he said in the interview Monday.