By Ellen Knickmeyer Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, April 3, 2005; Page A16
BAGHDAD, April 2 -- Insurgents assailed Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on Saturday, launching waves of car bombs, rockets and gunfire in an hours-long onslaught that wounded 18 American GIs and 12 detainees, the U.S. military said.
The attackers apparently did not penetrate the prison grounds, although some inmates were reported to have been seriously wounded. The second of two car bombs exploded as troops were trying to evacuate the injured after the first, the Reuters news agency said.
Meanwhile, the possibility of defusing Iraq's Sunni Muslim-led insurgency by drawing the Sunni minority into the country's government and military appeared more remote.
The Association of Muslim Scholars, the most prominent of dozens of groups speaking for disaffected Sunnis, distanced itself Saturday from an edict by 64 Sunni clerics and scholars the previous day that had encouraged Sunnis to join Iraq's new security forces.
In another setback for the government, efforts stalled to select a Sunni who would be widely accepted as parliament speaker.
The U.S. military said between 40 and 60 insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. U.S. forces still maintain a base and a detainee center at the sprawling complex, which became the focus of a U.S. military abuse scandal last year when photos emerged of American troops taunting naked, contorted Iraqi detainees.
Insurgents kept up sporadic attacks for about four hours, firing rocket-propelled grenades onto the prison grounds, said Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, the military spokesman for detention operations. Americans fired back with heavy weapons.
There was no word on any casualties among the attackers. It was unclear late Saturday whether any detainees had escaped.
The attack was larger in scale than the shoot-and-run ambushes, car bombings and suicide bombings that have characterized the guerrilla campaign against the two-year-old U.S.-led military occupation.
Most of Iraq's insurgents have been Sunnis, who dominated the country's political and military leadership until the U.S. invasion.
Sunni organizations generally have boycotted Iraq's post-Saddam Hussein government and military, and the Association of Muslim Scholars had backed a Sunni boycott of the Jan. 30 national elections.
On Saturday, the association said it had nothing to do with an edict read by one of its more moderate clerics that encouraged Sunnis to join the military and police forces, whose ranks are filled largely by Shiite Muslims and Kurds.
A statement from the association did not repudiate the edict outright, saying another statement on enlistment would be issued later.
Lawmakers remained deadlocked Saturday on a candidate to become speaker of the National Assembly. The appointment is an essential first step in the assembly's election of a government.
The assembly was scheduled to meet Sunday, and a Sunni Arab legislator widely distrusted by Shiites threatened to lead a walkout if he was not elected speaker.