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Car bomb kills 30 in market east of Baghdad

Posted on: Saturday, 17 September 2005, 14:03 CDT

By Sebastian Alison

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A car bomb blew up in a market town east of Baghdad on Saturday, killing 30 people and wounding 38 at the end of one of the bloodiest weeks in and around the Iraqi capital since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.

A police spokesman said the explosion in Nahrwan, some 45 km (30 miles) from Baghdad, also wounded 38 people.

"It was not a suicide bomb," he said. "A car parked in the middle of the square and later it blew up."

More than 200 people have been killed in bombings and shootings in and near Baghdad this week, including at least 114 in a single suicide bomb on Wednesday that targeted a crowd of day labourers waiting to be hired in a Shi'ite Muslim district.

Iraq's Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led government, backed by the United States, faces a Sunni Arab revolt that has intensified ahead of an October 15 referendum on a new constitution.

Sunni Arabs, the dominant community under ousted leader Saddam Hussein, fear they will lose influence under the new charter and many have vowed to reject it.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, which has claimed responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks in the country, this week proclaimed all-out war on majority Shi'ites.

He issued his call in response to an assault by Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. forces, on the northern town of Tal Afar, long regarded by Baghdad and Washington as a stronghold of "terrorists and foreign fighters."

SHOW OF CONFIDENCE

In a show of confidence, Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi visited the town on Saturday to congratulate Iraq's fledgling army "on the high standard of their performance in Tal Afar," the ministry said in a statement.

The U.S. military said last week the Tal Afar assault had killed 145 insurgents and detained 361, adding that another 226 had been killed and 757 captured in separate recent operations in nearby Mosul, northern Iraq's largest city.

Despite this, the insurgency shows no signs of abating.

A U.S. general said on Thursday the military was ready to strike more targets in western Iraq where he said intelligence shows Zarqawi is most active, especially in towns along the Euphrates valley near Syria.

Washington and Baghdad accuse Syria of letting foreign fighters and weapons flow across the border into Iraq. Damascus denies it. Iraq closed parts of the frontier last Sunday.

Iraq has made much of the fact that its own troops led the operation in Tal Afar. The U.S. military says it has now trained more than 190,000 Iraqi soldiers. President Jalal Talabani said in the United States this week that Iraqi forces were ready to take over some duties from U.S. troops, but gave no timetable.

Earlier on Saturday police in Baghdad found nine bodies shot in the head and chest in three separate incidents.

One civilian was killed and 17 people, including three Iraqi soldiers, were wounded when a car driven by a suicide bomber exploded near an Iraqi army patrol in Baquba, police said.

Source: REUTERS

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