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Baghdad attacks kill over 150

Posted on: Wednesday, 14 September 2005, 12:13 CDT

By Mohammed Ramahi and Faris Mehdawi

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide bomber lured a crowd of Shi'ite Muslim day laborers to his minivan and blew it up in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 114 people in the bloodiest of a wave of attacks that took more than 150 lives in the capital.

He drew the men to his vehicle with promises of work before detonating the bomb, which contained up to 500 pounds (220 kg) of explosives, an Interior Ministry source said.

It was the second deadliest single attack since the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003, and comes after days of fighting between Iraqi and U.S. troops and Sunni rebels in the remote town of Tal Afar in which some 160 people have died.

"There's no political party here, there are no police," Mohammed Jabbar railed at the blast site in the Shi'ite Kadhimiya area of Baghdad.

"This targeted civilians, innocents. Why women and children?" he added, as bystanders shouted, "Why? Why?"

Another car bomber blew himself up in northern Baghdad, killing 11 people lined up to refill gas canisters, as bombings rocked the capital. Gunmen also dragged 17 people from their homes and killed them in Taji, a northern Baghdad suburb.

A police official said the attacks appeared coordinated. Iraq's al Qaeda claimed in a statement it was waging a nationwide suicide bombing campaign to avenge the U.S.-Iraqi offensive on the northern town of Tal Afar.

The statement on an Islamist Web site often used by the Sunni Muslim militant group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did not, however, mention a specific attack.

Nayif Atshan, 58, was close to the Kadhimiya blast.

He said a man in a van pulled up to the crowd and asked if anyone wanted work. Some jumped in and others crowded around. Then the man got back in the van and it blew up, Atshan said.

"I still remember the man's beard," he said in Karama hospital, part of his leg blown off.

"After the explosion, cars were burning around me and flesh was scattered everywhere. It was raining blood."

Fears of civil war have grown ahead of an October 15 referendum on a new constitution for Iraq.

Iraqi government officials have accused Sunni militants of attacking majority Shi'ites, who swept to power in January polls boycotted by most Sunnis, in a bid to spark a civil war. Most of the victims of Wednesday's attacks were Shi'ites.

Bodies lay in the street beside burned-out cars, witnesses said. Some used wooden carts to haul away the dead.

Police said 114 people were killed and 156 wounded in the blast. The death toll has only been exceeded since the start of the war by a suicide car bombing on February 28 this year, which killed 125 people in Hilla, south of Baghdad.

Earlier this month more than 1,000 people died in Kadhimiya in a stampede on a bridge, triggered by rumors of a suicide bomber in a crowd during a Shi'ite religious ceremony.

POOLS OF BLOOD

At the nearby Kadhimiya hospital, overflowing with victims, dozens of the wounded screamed in agony as they were treated on the floor, some lying in pools of their own blood.

One man had severe burns to his arms and legs, and another victim, shivering uncontrollably, lay bleeding unattended.

Another blast echoed over central Baghdad about two hours after the first. Two more car bombs exploded soon afterwards.

Police said five people were killed and 24 wounded in one of the blasts, near a Shi'ite cleric's offices. Three policemen and three civilians were killed in an attack on a police convoy.

U.S. patrols also came under attack. A Reuters cameraman saw a military vehicle burned out by a roadside bomb, but the U.S. military said it suffered no casualties. Minutes later another bomb nearby wounded two Iraqi policemen in a convoy.

The gunmen in Taji had rounded up their victims in the middle of the night. All were shot in the head, and all were Shi'ite relatives from the same tribe, police said.

The run-up to the October vote has worsened tensions between Iraq's main communities, Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

Sunnis, who comprise 20 percent of the population, dominated Iraq for decades and resent their loss of influence since Saddam Hussein was toppled by U.S. forces in April 2003.

They fear the constitution will institutionalize their reduced role, by granting autonomy to southern Shi'ites in line with that enjoyed by Kurds in the north, and by decentralizing control of oil revenues.

But Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, speaking in the United States, suggested Wednesday's attacks could even unite Iraq.

"This criminal act will not send any message other than hatred for them (the bombers), and will unite the Iraqi people further everyday, despite their diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds, behind the government," he said.

Iraq's parliament sent a "final draft" of the text to the United Nations on Wednesday, after making minor amendments designed to appease Sunni concerns. U.N. officials said they would not start printing it until the speaker of parliament assured them it was the final version.

Iraqi and U.S. troops have been fighting Sunni rebels for days in Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, killing 157 and detaining 440 people as well as finding 34 weapons caches, an Iraqi defense ministry official said on Wednesday.

The government said the Baghdad bombings proved the Tal Afar assault, known as "Operation Restoring Rights," had succeeded.

"The fact that the terrorists are claiming to be responding specifically to Operation Restoring Rights shows the serious blow that operation has dealt them," it said in a statement. .

(Additional reporting by Michael Georgy, Mussab Al-Khairalla, Yasser Faisal, Sebastian Alison, Luke Baker, Haider Salahiddine)

Source: REUTERS

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