The Baghdad Blast.

The building which houses Iraq's parliament is more accessible to the public and not as secure as the PM's offices or the homes of various political leaders. But the April 12 attack is probably the most serious breach of security to date in the Green Zone, the swathe of the city guarded by the US and allied militaries, private security contractors and Iraqi troops. One Sunni MP was killed in the blast.

The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), an umbrella for Neo-Salafi insurgent groups which includes al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia on April 13 claimed responsibility for the attack which also wounded at least 22 other people. ISI said in an Internet posting the bomber had carried out the attack after studying the site, adding: "A heroic knight of the Islamic State of Iraq, may God bless its men, went inside the crowd of the infidels of the so-called parliament on Thursday, April 12, 2007... God has destroyed the crowds of defectors and infidels". Parliament on April 13 held an emergency "defiance session" to mourn the death of Muhammad Awad, the MP who was killed and condemn the "terrorists" for their attack. Awad was a member of the National Dialogue Front, a Sunni Arab political party.

The special session was shown on TV. It was sparsely attended. Some legislators wept. Others put flowers in Awad's empty chair. Prominent politicians marched to a podium to give a eulogy. One of them, Nada Muhammad Ibrahim al-Jubouri, from the same party as Awad, had also been in the parliament cafeteria when the bomb went off, and she spoke with bandages covering the front of her neck. She said: "I thought yesterday not of my brothers or sisters in the mean incident that took place, but of the Iraqi citizens who are subject to violence and killing. The citizens might not get the treatment we received in Ibn Sina hospital from the American doctors. We have to forget our differences and make concessions to Iraq. We have to forget pain and reunite again. We have only Iraq. I'm not thinking of myself. I'm thinking of my wounded people and how to serve them".

Deputy PM Barham Saleh, a prominent Kurd, on April 13 told the state-run TV Iraqiya three people had been detained in the investigation. In a video news conference from Baghdad with correspondents at the Pentagon and as the inquiry continued, the US commander of day-to-day military operations in Iraq, Lt Gen Raymond Odierno, on April 13 said there were no plans for the American military to take over security of the parliament building, adding: "I think that what we have to do is, we have to work with the Iraqi security forces and continue to work with them and help them to be able to maintain security of their own parliament. They are capable of doing it...frankly, yesterday was a bad day, a very bad day, but we're going to come back from that". Specific details of the bomber's identity and how he entered the parliament were still to be determined, he said, adding: "Something didn't go right. There's plenty of defences there, and they should not be able to penetrate it. But either they figured out a way for us not to detect it or simply somebody didn't do their job, and we have to find out what happened".

President George W. Bush strongly condemned the attack, saying: "My message to the Iraqi government is 'We stand with you'". The US government-fun al-Hurra TV showed the blast and the startled Shi'ite MP, Jalaluddin al-Saghir, ducking for cover. It then showed the immediate aftermath: people screaming for help in a smoky hallway, with one man slumped over, covered in dust, motionless. A woman was shown kneeling over what appeared to be a wounded or dead man near a table. The camera then focused on a bloody, severed leg.

The attack took place two months after the US military began a new security plan in Baghdad with additional troops. Bush had announced deployment of 30,000 more troops to Iraq, many of them to be placed in neighbourhoods in the capital. Many have already arrived, and the rest are expected to be there by June. Killings from death squads have dropped in the capital, but overall civilian and US casualties across Iraq has not improved, largely because of devastating Neo-Salafi suicide bombings like the one on April 12.

In October 2004, at the start of the holy month of Ramadan, two bombs exploded inside the Green Zone, killing at least five people, including three US security contractors. One of those bombings took place in a market, and the other inside a popular cafe. Muhammad Abu Bakr, a Sunni MP who heads parliament's media department, said he saw the suspected bomber's body amid the ghastly scene, adding: "I saw two legs in the middle of the cafeteria and none of those killed or wounded lost their legs - which means they must be the legs of the suicide attacker".

Senior US military officials were on April 13 quoted as saying two suicide vests had been found in a garbage bin in the Green Zone about two weeks earlier. Although the parliament building is within the zone and people must pass through security searches to reach it, the building itself has its own security. It is not supervised by the US military, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Defence. The government's security adviser Muaffaq al-Rubai'e said: "We need to work out new measures. We advised the parliament that no visitors should go into the building and...they should give us responsibility for the force protection and we would be in charge, but they didn't want it". He said three weeks earlier he had insisted on a top-to-bottom check of the parliament building and his security staff found 19 pistols. "It was a very unpopular move", he said, "parliament didn't like it".

The bombing was the second directly aimed at the power structure of Iraq since March 23, when a bodyguard of Deputy PM Salam al-Zuba'ie blew himself up within feet of Zubaie, the highest-ranking Sunni in the Iraqi government. Zuba'ie was seriously wounded in the attack.

In other Baghdad violence, at least 10 people were killed when Neo-Salafis managed to partially destroy the al-Sarafiya bridge across the Tigris with a truck bomb. The death toll may rise from cars which plummeted into the river from the broken structure. The bridge, one of nine major spans across the Tigris, links a mostly-Sunni area in north-east Baghdad and a Shi'ite district. The blast marked one of the first times that Sunni insurgents have been able to seriously damage part of the country's transport infrastructure. On April 14 Neo-Salafis bombed al-Jadriya bridge, another major span in Baghdad.

In the southern city of Diwaniya, where US and Iraqi forces have been clashing for over a week with militias loyal to radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, US soldiers on April 13 prevented Sadr followers from praying in the Imam Ali mosque. The followers then went to the Sadr office to hold prayers, where Americans arrested three men, including the main spokesman. Sadr supporters blocked the US vehicles from leaving, and the Americans released the three men. The US military had to move a Stryker unit out of Baghdad to deal with surging violence in Diwaniya, a haven for Shi'ite militiamen.

Al-Qaeda's North African Reach: A series of suicide bombings in Algeria and Morocco last week signalled a sharp expansion in the threat from armed Neo-Salafi groups seeking to establish Sunni Islamic rule in North Africa. The increasingly bold bombers are posing a tough test for states trying to shore up stability in a region on Europe's southern flank which depends to a large extent on oil and gas exports and tourism. On April 11 in Algiers two suicide bombers killed 33 people and wounded 222. One of the attacks damaged the building housing the office of PM Abdelaziz Belkhadem. On April 10 and 14 suicide bombers detonated devices in poor neighbourhoods of Casablanca, Morocco.

The North African Maghreb states have long been prized by al-Qaeda as a potential launching pad for attacks on European cities. Two rare gun battles in normally placid Tunisia in December and January between Neo-Salafi and the police served to remind the region's governments that they faced a common threat. But the question of whether the attacks were co-ordinated by a single commander or organisation was not clear.

Moroccan Interior Minister Chakib Benmoussa on April 11 said the blasts on April 10 in Morocco and those in Algeria a day later were the unco-ordinated work of separate groups. But Magnus Ranstorp, terrorism expert from Swedish National Defence College, said: "The Moroccan government is probably right in saying there is not such a clear established link between the Moroccan and Algerian explosions, but it cannot be ruled out entirely". Anne Giudicelli of the Terrorisc consultancy said Neo-Salafi groups in the region shared the same ideology and overall aim, but there was no concrete evidence of operational links, adding: "There are links between individuals, they talk, and they share the same outlook, but it is not operational".

A turning point came in September 2006 when the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) said it had joined al-Qaeda and then announced in January that it had changed its name to al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb (QOIM). It proved to be a PR coup. The name change drew enormous media attention, the GSPC returned to the front pages of newspapers, and it was placed in the context of a possible spread of Islamist terrorism throughout North Africa. At the same time, the group shifted its strategy towards spectacular bombings in public places in towns and away from hit-and-run attacks on police in rural areas. Ranstorp said: "This is partly about seeking attention-grabbing headlines but I also think it has to do with finding where they can best create instability and destabilise the security situation". Giudicelli said: "The al-Qaeda link gave the GSPC the legitimacy to seek to federate the different groups in the region, but we cannot talk of a single organisation".

It is likely the bombers of Casablanca and Algiers shared bomb-making expertise available on the Internet and were inspired by the same sermons preaching martyrdom on cassettes and CDs in the poorer quarters of both cities. But there are differences among the region's armed groups. In Morocco, a poor but stable society, experts say Neo-Salafis seeking recruits for suicide missions focus on illiterate, jobless and vulnerable youths from the slums of Casablanca, Tangier and Tetouan. In Algeria, QOIM is made up of guerrillas based in mountain areas east of Algiers where the government is trying to assert its grip.