Saturday, June 27, 2009
Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD — A bomb hidden in a packed Baghdad market for motorcycles killed as many as 22 people Friday, the latest in a string of attacks that seem aimed at undermining the government before next week’s deadline for U.S. forces to exit Iraqi cities.
A pair of attacks in the last week killed more than 150 people in Baghdad and northern Iraq. On Thursday, another bombing killed seven people at a bus station in a western district of Baghdad.
The bomb Friday exploded not far from the Abdul Qadir Ghilani shrine, one of the city’s oldest Sunni mosques. Though most of the recent attacks have targeted Shiite districts, the latest bomb targeted a market that is popular with Sunnis and Shiites alike.
Police gave conflicting death tolls: One officer put the toll at 22; another said 13 had died.
“I saw some bodies and parts of motorcycles flying in the air at the moment of the explosion,” said vendor Ali Khudair Abbas from his hospital bed. The 29-year-old described watching two young men die next to him in the emergency room.
Abbas said he had hesitated before heading to the market due to the recent violence in Baghdad, but he couldn’t afford to stay away. He was 20 to 30 yards away when the bomb exploded amid rows of motorcycles, sending metal flying.
“I wonder why such place is targeted! We are not army or police. We are not Americans. All of those coming to the market were poor ... people hoping to get some money and return back to their families,” Abbas said.
By afternoon, the market was abandoned, except for two men on the roadside selling Pepsis from a cooler.
Some bent metal girders and a tangled bicycle in the empty dirt lot were the only indications a bomb had exploded.
Satar Dahel Abed said he had watched four of his friends die earlier. He pointed to an abandoned cooler, still filled with water and soda cans, that he said belonged to a man named Sayed Abu Mohammed and his two sons, all of whom died that morning.
Abed said a policeman had ordered him to move his cart from the center of the market, and by doing so inadvertently saved him from the blast. He worried about the days ahead.
“It’s going to get worse,” Abed said. His friend standing next to him, named Dahar Shaban, nodded and added, “It’s better for the Americans to stay.”
A second bombing killed one Iraqi and wounded three others in the Shiite neighborhood of Risala in western Baghdad, police said. In mainly Sunni Anbar province, west of Baghdad, gunmen tried to kill an adviser to the governor. Five policemen were killed outside the Anbar city of Fallujah the previous day, police said.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has predicted that armed groups will try to discredit his administration as the Iraqi security forces take on full responsibility for protecting cities.
The prime minister, who has staked his political future on maintaining the security gains of the last two years, has the most to lose if the country’s violence spirals out of control now.
National elections are less than seven months away. Al-Maliki has declared June 30, the deadline for the Americans to pull back, a national holiday, comparable to other milestones in modern Iraq’s history such as the 1920 uprising by Sunni and Shiite tribes against the British.