BAGHDAD, 3 December 2006 — More than 50 people were killed as a triple car bomb attack rocked the center of the Iraqi capital yesterday, in a gruesome reminder of similar bombings in a Shiite district of Baghdad the previous week.
The massive blasts ripped through the crowded commercial district as many Iraqis hurried home before nightfall, killing 51 people and wounding another 90, security officials said. Many of the dead were women.
Together with corpses found around the city, the toll for Saturday was a staggering 110 killed.
A defense official said the first blast had appeared to target an Iraqi Army Humvee jeep patrolling in the central Rusafa district at sunset. There were soldiers among the casualties, but he could not say how many.
The second blast erupted immediately after the first with the third a few moments later, rocking windows 500 meters (yards) away on the opposite bank of the Tigris. Shortly afterward gunfire erupted around the city.
Ten shops were burned out in the blasts near Al-Wathba square, a historic commercial area popular with Shiite Kurds, and 13 civilian cars destroyed, said an interior ministry official, warning the death toll was expected to rise.
Around an hour after the detonations, five more blasts were heard, apparently mortars fired by one of the city’s warring armed groups.
Yesterday’s attack followed a major security operation the previous day a short distance further north in the Fadhil neighborhood, in which Iraqi and US forces raided suspected insurgent hideouts and arrested 28 suspects.
The bombings recalled a deadly attack on Nov. 23 carried out in Baghdad’s Sadr City district when three car bombs went off at various spots killing 202 people in by far the worst attack in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
The Sadr City bombing triggered Shiite reprisals against Sunnis and at least four Sunni mosques bore their brunt. In other violence across Iraq yesterday, 15 more people were killed as insurgents and sectarian militia launched gun and bomb attacks in the region around the war-torn capital.
Five Iraqi soldiers returning to their base north of Baghdad in civilian clothes were killed when insurgents sprayed their cars with automatic fire, Lt. Ali Mohammed Hassan of the Balad police said. Elsewhere, 10 people were killed.
The latest bout of violence comes as one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite politicians, Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, headed to Washington for an unprecedented meeting with US President George W. Bush.
US press reports suggest that Washington is despairing of winning over Iraq’s bitter Sunni minority and is planning instead to rebuild its bridges with the divided nation’s Shiites in a bid to rein in their unofficial militias.
Meanwhile, Iraqi and US military officials said that between 30 and 35 suspects had been arrested in raids conducted in the restive city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, and that a hostage had been rescued from a gang of kidnappers holed up in a Sunni neighborhood.
An Iraqi Army major, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that two of the detained suspects were Egyptians who had joined the Sunni Arab insurgency against the Shiite-led government and its US backers.
The offensive came two days after the US commander in Diyala province, Col. David Sutherland, denied media reports that Baquba had been brought to a standstill by insurgents and was beyond Iraqi government control. Nevertheless, yesterday’s operation was billed by US headquarters as an attempt to “secure” the city.
An AFP reporter traveling with elements of the US 3rd Brigade Combat Team said American forces sealed off the Khatun and Mafraq districts of Baquba while Iraqi troops carried out the raids.
No coalition or Iraqi troops were hurt during the operation, which apparently passed off without violence. The daily death toll from the conflict across Iraq is mounting — last month saw 43 percent more civilian fatalities than October, according to official Iraqi figures — and Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s unity government is fragile.
After holding crisis talks with Maliki in Jordan this week, Bush has now invited Hakim, leader of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to Washington for more talks. While only having direct control over 30 MPs in Iraq’s 275-strong Parliament, Hakim is very influential and his movement’s huge, semi-official militia — the Badr Organization — has infiltrated state security forces.
His visit comes after US press reports that the White House is being urged to seek an “80 percent solution” to Iraq’s woes — one that would please the pro-American Kurds and win over suspicious pro-Iranian Shiites.
Hakim, however, is a strong supporter of plans for a fully federal Iraq, with a Shiite region in the south and center taking similar powers to those of the existing Kurdish autonomous region in the north, a vision US experts fear may plunge Iraq into further civil turmoil.
