Saturday, September 17, 2005
Insurgents are targeting U.S.-led forces and the Shiite majority.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A car bomb exploded near an outdoor market in a poor, dusty Shiite village east of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 30 Iraqis and wounding 48 as a new spate of sectarian bloodshed continued for a fourth day.
Iraqi authorities said the deaths were among at least 40 reported throughout the country. The four-day death toll from politically motivated violence rose to at least 250.
Police said the bomb blast in the Nahrawan district, a bleak agricultural region of dirt roads, mud-brick homes and impoverished Shiite farmers about 20 miles from Baghdad, was caused by a car parked near a public market that exploded around 6:30 p.m. as residents gathered to buy food and mingle.
The explosion destroyed cars and damaged shops. Police said that 30 minutes after the initial blast, insurgents fired mortar rounds into the area, sowing panic and chaos as police attempted to seal off the area and care for victims.
Their goal
Sunni Arab insurgents from Iraq and abroad have launched a campaign of car bombings and assassinations against U.S.-led forces and the nation's Shiite majority, apparently hoping to provoke a civil war that will radicalize Sunnis in Iraq and the region.
The latest onslaught began after U.S. soldiers and forces of the Shiite-led government completed a counter-insurgency operation in the northern city of Tal Afar, which reportedly had become a base for foreign fighters and Iraqi militants.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who claims to lead Al-Qaida's Iraq branch, declared war on Shiites for their actions in Tal Afar, which some Iraqi critics decried as "sectarian cleansing" against the city's Sunnis.
Defense Minister Saddoun Dulaymi, a Sunni, visited Tal Afar dignitaries, who "assured him that they understood the importance of the rule of law and rejected extremism and sectarianism," a government statement said.
Continuing violence
Low-scale violence between Sunnis and Shiites has continued for months. On Saturday police also discovered the bodies of nine men in various Baghdad neighborhoods. The bodies showed signs of torture and had bullet wounds to the head.
In the ethnically and religiously mixed city of Baqouba, 40 miles north of the capital, another car bomb targeting a convoy of Iraqi military vehicles killed one civilian and injured 17, witnesses and officials said.
Despite the pounding they've taken from insurgents, Shiites have mostly been reluctant to take revenge. However, on Saturday, police reported that armed Shiite members of the Tamimi tribe near the town of Taji, 15 miles north of Baghdad, had taken up arms and blocked the country's main north-south highway, stopping cars and ordering drivers to return home.
A group of gunmen who tried to storm the main Taji police station were repulsed with no casualties reported, an Interior Ministry official said.