The Hotel Mansour Melia bombing
The man-packed explosive used to engage the Hotel Al-Mansour Melia in the center of Baghdad at noon today had a specific target.
Killed were Hussein Chaalan, a Shi'i tribal chief from Diwaniyah and deputy in the list of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, Fassal Al-Kaoud, a member of the coalition named "Dawn of Al-Anbar" aka "Anbar Salvation Council" engaged in operations targeting Al Qaida in Anbar province. See Marc's piece on the ASC at Abu Aardvark.
Also toe-tagged was Rahim Al-Maliki, a poet working for the Iraqia TV station and two Sunni tribal leaders (names not yet released).
The dead had assembled in the hotel lobby and were about to leave the hotel to meet an (unnamed) member of the current regime for the purpose of talks on national reconcilliation.
The WaPo is still reporting this as simply more of the day's senseless random splatter-and-morgue, a hit on a high value hotel.
Update: The AP now has this:
[unnamed police officer] identified four tribal leaders killed as former Anbar governor Fassal al-Guood, sheik of the al-Bu Nimir tribe, Sheik Abdul-Azizi al-Fahdawi of the Fahad tribe, Sheik Tariq Saleh al-Assafi and Col. Fadil al-Nimrawi, both of the al-Bu Nimr tribe. Three of al-Guood's guards also were killed.
It also has this interesting bit:
After the blast, a member of the Anbar Salvation Council said in the provincial capital of Ramadi that the sheiks meeting at the Mansour Hotel had been dropped from the council "because they did not continue working with us." He said they had been meeting secretly with government officials, about unspecified matters.
So the ASC leaked their 20 to the Opfors? Our tax dollars at work.
The Embassy of the People's Republic of China is located within the Mansour, and a number of Iraqi parliament members reside there when in Baghdad. It is 2,000 feet from the Green Zone and its physical security has at least three checkpoints the man-packed munition had to pass through undetected, or unreported.
