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Car Bomb Kills at Least 30 Outside Iraqi Hospital

Posted on: Friday, 25 November 2005, 12:00 CST

By Edward Wong

A suicide car bomber blew himself up near an American convoy Thursday at the entrance of the main hospital in the volatile town of Mahmudiya, killing at least 30 Iraqis and wounding dozens of others in a ball of flame and shrapnel.

At least 18 other Iraqis, including the police commander of Mahmudiya, and 5 American soldiers were reported killed in various incidents.

The bombing in Mahmudiya was particularly vicious, taking place outside a hospital as visitors and the sick were coming and going. The blast flung bystanders and body parts through the air and shattered the facades of buildings for blocks around.

Policemen and Iraqi Army soldiers quickly sealed off the town's main streets while American helicopters circled the scene of carnage. So overwhelmed were the doctors in the area that the most serious cases, some with missing limbs, had to be transported 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, north to Baghdad.

Ali Khudaiyer Inad Sigar, 13, said he had been buying chocolate at a shop after getting an injection at the hospital for a chronic illness when the bomber suddenly appeared.

"A red car coming at high speed exploded," Ali said as he drifted in and out of an anesthetic-induced haze in a bed in Baghdad's Yarmouk Hospital. Cuts covered his face and arms, and doctors had amputated his right leg.

"I found myself on the lawn on the hospital. Then I fainted. When I woke up, I thought I was home."

The police commander of Mahmudiya, Lieutenant Colonel Moayad Jabir, died in a roadside bomb explosion as he was driving outside town, an Interior Ministry official said.

Mahmudiya lies in a restive part of the Euphrates River valley south of Baghdad commonly called the Triangle of Death, because of the frequency of ambushes by guerrillas and bandits there. Towns in the region served as munitions production sites for Saddam Hussein's army, and well-appointed villas given by the government to senior Baath Party members and army officers line stretches of the riverbank.

The American military has often tried sweeps of towns and villages there, only to find that the residents had cleared out well before the operations began. Some of the worst sectarian violence of the post-Saddam era has taken place in the area, as Sunni Arabs and Shiites struggle for control of the towns and of the major arteries leading south from the capital to the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Shiite pilgrims going to those cities have often turned up dead alongside the main road, known as the Highway of Death.

The executions have incited so much fury that some Shiites in the south have announced the creation of vengeance-seeking militias to combat the slayings. The sectarian nature of Iraq's low-level civil war is evident in virtually every major attack that takes place now. A surge in such assaults has roiled the country in the last week and tested the limits of Shiite patience. On Nov. 18, a pair of suicide bombers detonated themselves in two Shiite mosques in the Kurdish town of Khanaqin, killing at least 70. A car bombing at a Shiite funeral the next day killed at least 30. By the end of the weekend, at least 155 Iraqis and eight American and British soldiers had been killed over a three-day period.

The attacks could be timed to the fast approach of the Dec. 15 elections for a new Parliament charged with appointing full, four- year government. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq, has called for Shiites to remain calm in the face of such violence.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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