BAGHDAD — A series of five bombings that killed more than 60 people Wednesday in Iraq is part of an escalating guerrilla offensive that has cost about 400 lives in the last two weeks and has seen daily attacks nearly double since March.
Insurgents are staging about 75 attacks a day, up from 30 to 40 daily six weeks ago, according to the U.S. military. Increasingly, the rebels appear to be employing car bombs. In April, the military recorded 135 car bombs, almost doubling the number in March, said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a military spokesman here.
This month, when as many as a dozen car bombs have exploded in a single day, may set a bleak new record. U.S. authorities concede that they have yet to find a way to control the insurgents' most effective weapon. "There's no foolproof method against it," Boylan said.
The offensive appears to coincide with the seating of a U.S.-backed government three months after a parliamentary election in January.
"They [the insurgents] are clearly making a renewed effort," said a U.S. official here who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of Washington's position. "I would guess but cannot prove that some of this is related to the formation of the government, since I think one of the things that took a piece out of the insurgency was the election. And they need to show they're not down and out."
Military officials said the surge in violence more than two years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein was probably the result of weeks of planning and marshaling of resources, especially suicide bombers and bomb-laden vehicles.
"It's a spike: When it will go in the other direction we don't know," Boylan said. "They're expending a lot of resources right now. We don't know how long they'll be capable of sustaining it."
Marines have captured or killed scores of guerrillas in an offensive underway in western Iraq aimed at foreign fighters allegedly infiltrating from neighboring Syria. Although some officials and experts have hypothesized that the most fervent insurgents are foreigners, not Iraqis, that idea has been increasingly discounted.
"There's a kind of axiom out there that says Iraqis aren't suicide bombers," Gen. George W. Casey, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad this year. "I'm not sure that's the case. I believe there are Iraqi Islamic extremists ... that are very capable of getting into cars and blowing themselves up."
