IRAQI RESISTANCE

Independent: Checkpoints Prove Useless Against Suicide Bombers in Iraq by Robert Fisk

A severed arm with a hand still attached to it lay a few metres from the broken gates of the mayor's office in Karbala yesterday, a piece of humanity every bit as bloody as the story of the seventh-century Shia martyr Hussein, the golden dome of whose shrine could be seen through the smog to the east.

They said the arm belonged to a police major - one of 11 cops killed in the four ferocious attacks on Saturday in this most holy of cities - but others claimed it belonged to the man who drove the truck-bomb right up to the gates.

In the parking lot outside, stunned Polish and Bulgarian troops, many of them in the clapped-out Russian vehicles that Saddam's own army used until its demise eight months ago, looked at the scene with a strange mixture of awe and contempt. Four Bulgarians were killed a mile away when another man drove an oil tanker right up to their camouflaged headquarters.

When I approached one Bulgarian officer a few metres from the 20-foot hole that the bomb had blasted in the road, he turned away in tears