BAGHDAD, 1 October 2005 — Insurgents killed at least 10 people, including women and children, with a car bomb in a crowded vegetable market yesterday in the second blast against Shiites in as many days, police said. The death toll rose to 102 from the previous day’s coordinated string of bombings and mortars in another town.
Iraqi security forces captured a woman wearing explosives hidden under her clothes headed for a crowded weekly second-hand goods market in Baghdad yesterday, an Iraqi general said. The discovery came days after the first known blast by a female suicide attacker, which raised fears of a new insurgent strategy.
Elsewhere, in the southern city of Basra, an Iraqi police convoy was ambushed late Thursday, killing four policemen and wounding one, said police Capt. Mushtaq Khazim.
The pair of bombing attacks in two mainly Shiite towns, Hillah and Balad, appeared aimed at killing as many civilians as possible. In Thursday evening’s attacks in Balad, a parked car packed with explosives detonated just as people rushed in to help victims of a suicide car bombing in a nearby market. Moments later, another parked car exploded 200 meters away.
Sunni insurgents have launched a bloody new surge of violence to wreck an Oct. 15 referendum on a new constitution — targeting the Shiite majority, which now dominates Iraq’s government. At least 198 people, including 13 US service members, have been killed in the past five days.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq — the country’s most feared insurgent group, which has declared “all-out war” on Shiites — issued a claim of responsibility for the Balad attack in a web statement issued yesterday. The statement, however, said three car bombs exploded Thursday morning and hit Iraqi police and National Guard units. The claim’s authenticity could not be verified.
Moderate Sunni Arab leaders have urged their community to reject the constitution, saying it will fragment Iraq and leave them weak compared to Shiites and Kurds. Passage of the charter is key to prospects for starting a withdrawal of American troops — and if it fails, the country’s political instability will deepen.
Yesterday’s car bomb exploded at 9:30 a.m. in Hillah’s Souq Al-Sharia, an outdoor vegetable market bustling with shoppers making purchases on the day off, before weekly prayers. The market is about 200 meters from the provincial governor’s office.
At least 10 people, including three women and two children, were killed and 41 were wounded, said Dr. Mohammed Beirum of Hillah General Hospital.
As Iraqi police and soldiers sealed off the market, emergency workers lifted wounded victims and dead bodies into ambulances from streets covered with pools of blood and shattered vegetable stands.
“I saw a fireball rising from the marketplace, and vegetables and human flesh flying through the air,” said Jawad Khazim, 45, who witnessed the attack from a nearby street.
He condemned the insurgents for trying to kill Shiites and said he didn’t understand why they would target a crowded marketplace where minority Sunnis and Christians could be, too. “Why did the insurgents do this?” Khazim said.
The Balad attack came Thursday just before sunset, 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of the capital. A suicide bomber drove his car into the town’s outdoor produce market, detonating it, followed moments later by an explosion of a car parked at a nearby bank. Another parked car exploded on Bint Al-Hassan Street, a busy commercial avenue, said Col. Kazem Abdul-Razaaq, the town’s police chief. He was wounded in the blasts, along with four other police rushing to the scene of the first explosion.
The same day, two of Abdul-Razaaq’s officers, including a lieutenant colonel, were shot to death in their car in Baghdad.
At least 102 people were killed, including 13 children and four women, and the 150 wounded included 35 children and 25 women, said Dr. Khaled Al-Azzawi of Balad Hospital.
