IRAQ - Children Used As Neo-Salafi Decoy.

The Iraqi police on March 21 said children had been used in a March 18 car bombing in which the driver gained permission to park in a busy shopping area after he said he was leaving his children in the back seat. The account confirmed one given on March 20 by Maj Gen Michael Barbero, deputy director for regional operations on the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said children had been used in the bombing - which took place in the predominantly Shi'ite district of Sha'b in northern Baghdad. This has been labelled as a brutal new tactic by Neo-Salafi insurgents.

Gen Barbero said the vehicle used in the attack was waved through a US military checkpoint because two children were visible in the back seat. He said it was the first reported use of children in a car bombing in Baghdad, telling reporters: "Children in the back seat lowered suspicion. We let it move through. They parked the vehicle. The adults run out and detonated it with the children in the back".

AP on March 21 quoted two Iraqi policemen as saying the general had been referring to a car bomb which killed 8 Iraqis and wounded 28. The attack was aimed at people cooking food on grills in the street as part of a holiday commemorating the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad's death.

Sunni Deputy PM Hit: A Sunni who crossed the sectarian divide to join the Shiite-led government as Deputy PM, Salam al-Zouba'ie, was on March 23 gravely wounded in a suicide bombing in a mosque at his home. Nine people were killed in the attack. One of his guards with an explosives vest blew himself up as Zouba'ie, one of two deputies PMs, was leaving a mosque built inside the courtyard of his compound in a central Baghdad residential area behind the Foreign Ministry.

MP Hareth al-Obeidi, with Zouba'ie's Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF), the largest Sunni parliamentary bloc, said the mosque was in a tightly secured area and cars would be searched but not people. Zouba'ie's compound is near the Green Zone. Ziad al-Ani, a top official from the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), said the attacker blew himself up inside the mosque during Friday prayers. The Baghdad authorities had imposed a weekly four-hour vehicle ban from 11 am-3 pm on Fridays to protect Friday prayer services from Neo-Salafi suicide car bombers.

Zouba'ie was taken to a US hospital in the Green Zone. His brother and cousin died, as did the imam of the mosque. One of the nine people killed in the attack was an adviser to Zouba'ie, Mufeed Abdul-Zahra. Five of Zoubaie's guards were among the 14 people wounded. Like most of the Sunni Arab politicians who agreed to join Maliki's Shi'ite-dominated government, Zouba'ie is routinely denounced by Neo-Salafi insurgents as a traitor.

Maliki named Zouba'ie as his deputy for security. The other Deputy PM, Barham Saleh, a Kurd, holds the economics portfolio. Zouba'ie has repeatedly complained he was being sidelined by Maliki and his top aides, saying his authority did not exceed that of a junior government employee.

US Troops Fanning Out Into 100 Garrisons To Secure Baghdad: US forces in Baghdad are to operate out of 100 neighbourhood garrisons across the capital in the next month as part of the new offensive to secure the city. Thousands of additional US troops are expected to enter the Baghdad area by May, to bolster the forces already there.

Expansion of the garrisons is essentially a repudiation of military policy of the last two years, in which US troops spent more time on bases and less doing patrols or interacting with Iraqis. Critics say the previous emphasis on minimising US casualties, called force protection, allowed Baghdad and other parts of Iraq to spin out of control.

Now US soldiers in the garrisons are to do what they did in 2003 - meet with locals to discuss social and economic issues, shake hands with residents and walk the markets. US soldiers would be at greater risk, but they would be ready to defend themselves against any attacks. There are 4,300 US soldiers now in the Baghdad area, and many are still expected to operate out of large bases rather than the garrisons.

Many Iraqis, especially ones in predominantly Sunni areas, say they welcome the Americans in their streets. Moderate Sunnis have been targets of Shi'ite militias, like Jaysh al-Mahdi, as well as the Neo-Salafi groups.

The US garrisons are: joint security stations in which company-size units (120 to 150 troops) work with Iraqi forces, and combat outposts which serve as temporary forts. The units at the combat outposts vary widely, from a platoon to a battalion. The joint security stations are expected to be permanent, perhaps transformed into Iraqi police stations in the long term.

US and Iraqi forces regularly based in Baghdad are being supplemented by nine Iraqi Army battalions coming in from outside the city. Each battalion has 700 men. In the first month of the security plan, the kind of murders usually attributed to Shi'ite militias or death squads dropped by a third. Shi'ite militia commanders say Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shi'ite cleric, has told his Jaysh al-Mahdi to lie low for now.