BAGHDAD, 4 February 2007 — A suicide bomber killed 135 people yesterday in the deadliest single attack in Iraq since the 2003 war, driving a truck laden with one ton of explosives into a market in a mainly Shiite area of Baghdad.
The blast, which Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki blamed on Saddam Hussein supporters and other militants, shattered fruit and vegetable stalls, caved in shop fronts and left the smashed bodies of shoppers strewn in the street.
It came as US and Iraqi troops prepared for a planned offensive seen as a last-ditch effort to stem worsening sectarian bloodshed that kills hundreds in Baghdad every week.
“It was a terrible scene. Many shops and houses were destroyed,” said one resident, Jassem, 42, who rushed from his home to help pull people from the rubble after hearing the explosion that rocked central Baghdad.
“All Iraqis were shaken today by this crime,” Maliki said in a statement in which he again spoke of his government’s determination to crush the militants. “The Saddamists and Takfirists (Sunni militants) have committed another crime.”
Police said 305 people were wounded. The casualties swamped the capital’s hospitals. There were chaotic scenes at Ibn Al-Nafis Hospital in central Baghdad, where hallways overflowed with wounded on trolleys.
“I was in my shop and there was a great explosion and the roof fell in on me. I woke up here in hospital,” said one man at the hospital with blood streaming down his face.
Emergency workers dragged bodies from the debris and piled them on pickup trucks, a Reuters reporter at the scene said.
In Washington, the White House called the suicide bombing an “atrocity” and pledged to help the Iraqi government bring security to Baghdad.
Three car bombs in the same market in December killed 51.
The blast came hours after Iraq’s leading Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani renewed an appeal to Iraqis to avoid violence. “Everybody knows the necessity for us to stand together and reject the sectarian tension to avoid stirring sectarian differences,” his new fatwa, or religious edict, said.
In the worst previous single bombing in Iraq, a suicide car bomber killed 125 people in Hilla south of Baghdad in February 2005. In November 2006 six car bombs in different parts of the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad killed 202 and wounded 250.
Yesterday’s bombing will again throw the spotlight on Maliki’s planned security sweep in the capital and whether it will succeed where other similar crackdowns have failed.
