BAGHDAD, 28 October 2003 — In a shocking day of bloodshed across Baghdad, a team of suicide car bombers bent on death for “collaborators” devastated the Red Cross headquarters and three police stations yesterday, killing three dozen people and wounding more than 200.
From north to south in this city of 5 million, the string of bombings left streetscapes of bloody, broken bodies, twisted wreckage and Iraqis unnerved by an apparently escalating underground war against the US occupation. “We feel helpless when see this,” said an Iraqi doctor outside the Red Cross offices.
The dead included a US soldier, eight Iraqi policemen and at least 26 Iraqi civilians.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said they believed loyalists of Iraq’s ousted President Saddam Hussein were responsible for the bombings. US President George W. Bush said insurgents had become more “desperate” because of what he said was progress in Iraq.
But here in Baghdad, top Iraqi and US officers blamed “foreign fighters,” not Saddam diehards, for the day’s mayhem. “That’s a reasonable supposition,” said a US general responsible for the Iraqi capital.
It underscored the confusion and tension generated by two days of bold, stunning attacks, beginning with a rocket barrage that pounded a US headquarters hotel on Sunday morning, killing a US colonel, wounding 15 other people and sending American officials scurrying to safety, including the visiting deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.
Later Sunday, three US soldiers were killed in two attacks in the Baghdad area. Then at 8:30 a.m. yesterday, on a warm, clear morning beginning the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, the first of four thunderous explosions rocked the city.
A police car, somehow commandeered for a suicide mission and driven by a man in police uniform, blew up after entering the courtyard of the Al-Bayaa police station in the southern district of Ad-Doura, said police Brig. Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, the deputy interior minister.
Officers at the scene said the blast killed 15 Iraqis and one US soldier, and the US military said six other Americans were wounded. American troops, including military police, have been guarding or working with local police stations.
Just five minutes later, the second blast struck the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, a small, three-story building on a quiet street in the central city. This bomber, too, used a subterfuge — a standard Iraqi ambulance that apparently was able to approach the ICRC offices without suspicion.
“Of course we don’t understand why somebody would attack the Red Cross,” said Nada Doumani, Baghdad spokeswoman for the ICRC, an organization that has long strived for political neutrality.
Two buildings away, the explosion devastated the interior of a private polyclinic operated by Dr. Jamal F. Massa, 53, who had been planning to open it as a full-fledged hospital next month. “We feel helpless when we see this,” he said of the ICRC bombing. He couldn’t understand why the Red Cross was targeted, he said, since “this only hurts guards and other Iraqis.”
Twenty minutes after the ICRC attack, another car bomber detonated his explosives-packed vehicle at a police station near a marketplace in the Al-Shaab district of north Baghdad. Gen. Ibrahim said the greatest number of casualties occurred there. After another 20 minutes, the fourth suicide bomber struck in southwest Baghdad, at the Al-Khudra police station, destroying the front of that building.
Besides the dead, at least 224 people were reported wounded in the four attacks, including 65 policemen, Ibrahim said.
At 10:15 a.m., yet another bombing was attempted, at a police station in the eastern district of New Baghdad, where officers managed to spot and stop a Land Cruiser driver from detonating his load of explosives. The man set off a grenade that wounded an officer and himself, and when he was seized, “he was shouting, ‘Death to the Iraqi police! You’re collaborators!’” said police Sgt. Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
Ibrahim said the man was carrying a Syrian passport and told officers he was Syrian. “Some countries, unfortunately, are trying to send people to conduct attacks,” the deputy interior minister said, without naming those nations.
Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, an assistant commander of the US 1st Armored Division, which occupies Baghdad, agreed that “foreign fighters” were prime suspects in yesterday’s bombings.
In Fallujah, 65 kilometers (40 miles) west of Baghdad, witnesses said US troops opened fire on bystanders, killing at least four Iraqi civilians, after a roadside bomb exploded as a US military convoy passed.
Meanwhile there was worldwide condemnation of the attack on the Red Cross headquarters. The European Union said it was “saddened and shocked”.
“We view the developments with great concern,” said German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder through a spokesman in Berlin.
A London spokesman said Prime Minister Tony Blair “utterly condemns these evil and wicked attacks”.
— Additional input from agencies
