BAGHDAD, 23 May 2007 — Twenty-five people were killed and 60 wounded when a car bomb tore through a busy market area in southwest Baghdad yesterday, police said.
At least two buildings were completely destroyed and many others badly damaged when the bomb went off near a popular outdoor market in Amil, a mostly Shiite district.
It was the worst car bomb attack in Baghdad since May 6 when 35 people were killed in neighboring Bayaa, another Shiite district which has been a repeated target of attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda.
Thousands of extra US and Iraqi troops have been deployed around Baghdad and other areas in a three-month-old security crackdown aimed at dragging Iraq back from the brink of sectarian civil war.
US President George W. Bush is under pressure from his Republican Party to show progress in Iraq by September, but at the same time has rejected timetables for a US pullout proposed by Democrats.
Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, will deliver a progress report on the troop buildup in September.
“I see it as an important moment, because David Petraeus says that’s when he’ll have a pretty good assessment as to what the effects of the surge has been,” Bush told Reuters in Washington.
The security crackdown is designed to buy time for Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s government to meet a series of political targets set by Washington.
These “benchmarks” aim to promote national reconciliation and to draw Sunni Arabs, dominant under Saddam Hussein, into the political process and away from the insurgency. US officials say the security crackdown has helped reduce the number of targeted sectarian killings but car bombings are still frequent.
Television footage showed cars and shops on fire in the center of Amil’s main street. Residents with buckets of water rushed to help firefighters douse blazes.
One body lay covered by a yellow sheet, while others were carried out of the rubble in blankets. Other shaken residents climbed down the sides of partially destroyed buildings. “There was a blast. It killed a large number of innocent people, poor people who worked to earn a living,” one man told Reuters Television.
In other violence yesterday, gunmen at a fake military checkpoint in Baquba shot dead a family of six, including an infant, police said.
Baquba is the capital of volatile Diyala province, a large and religiously mixed region which has suffered some of the worst violence since the 2003 invasion. Shootings of young children are still rare despite the extent of violence in Iraq.
An Iraqi parliamentary committee has failed to finalize an agreement on amending key articles in the constitution, one of the political benchmarks Washington says are important to end sectarian violence.
After six months of talks, the constitutional reform committee had been expected to present Parliament with a final draft of their recommendations yesterday.
Committee members said they would ask political leaders to deal with sensitive issues such as sharing Iraq’s oil wealth more equitably and ending a ban on former members of Saddam’s party members holding public office. “We have agreed on some articles but there are sensitive issues which need an agreement among the political leaders,” said Saleem Al-Jubori, a member of the Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni political bloc in Parliament. The changes are aimed at bringing Sunni Arabs, who make up the backbone of the insurgency, more firmly into the political process.
Jubori said Sunni Arab and Shiite members of the committee disagreed with a Kurdish demand to allow regions to distribute oil income rather than the central government.
