IRAQ: Baghdad yesterday reeled under an onslaught of suicide bombs that killed at least 31 people and wounded more than 30, as Sunni militant groups bent on spreading sectarian strife targeted police and civilians from the Shia community.
The renewed wave of violence followed the Iraqi capital's bloodiest day since the fall of Saddam, when 160 people were killed and 570 wounded in more than a dozen blasts across the city. It will add to pressure on the Iraqi government, holed up in Baghdad's Green Zone, as it attempts to convince Iraqis to go out to vote in a referendum on the new constitution scheduled for October 15th.
The troubled southern Baghdad district of Al-Doura bore the brunt of yesterday's violence, which began shortly after 8am when a suicide car bomber hurtled into a police bus, killing 16 police commandos and five civilians. Just before noon, also in Al-Doura, two suicide car bombers struck within a minute of each other, half a mile apart, killing nine policemen.
The streets of Al-Doura remained deserted as US army vehicles and Iraqi police cars drove through the neighbourhood, telling residents to stay indoors amid reports that five more car bombers were in the area. Adding to the relentless slaughter in the capital, three people were killed and 13 injured when a roadside bomb destroyed a bus carrying staff of the ministry of industry in eastern Baghdad.
Police also discovered the corpses of seven unidentified men in various parts of the capital. All were blindfolded and had their hands tied. The capital has yet to see the kind of open street-fighting that racked cities such as Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, but the conflict between Sunni and Shia groups is spreading to parts of the city where the communities have coexisted peacefully for years.
In Wednesday's most disturbing attack, a bomb in the neighbourhood of Khadamiyah tore through a group, largely composed of jobseekers, who had been drawn towards a truck driven by a suicide bomber posing as an employer.
The attacks were claimed by al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In an internet statement, the group declared war on Iraq's newly empowered Shia majority and said it was exacting revenge for the recent US-Iraqi offensive against insurgents in the northern town of Tal Afar.
"Our lions are still creating victory with their honourable blood and the battle to avenge the Sunnis of Tal Afar is still being waged in Baghdad and other cities," it said. Some believe Zarqawi's explicit advocacy of sectarian strife could backfire. A spokesman for the conservative Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, thought to have links to Sunni insurgents, yesterday attacked al-Qaeda's tactics.
"Zarqawi speaks from the position of revenge," Muhammed Bashar Faidi, a spokesman for the group, said on Al-Arabiya television. "This position by Zarqawi is aimed at provoking sectarian war [ but] if he wants a war he should fight the occupation forces, and not innocents."