Iraq Car Bomb Kills 22 After Deadly Day

11/24/2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Two bombs exploded in northern Iraq on Friday, killing at least 22 people and wounding 26, police said. It was the first major attack by suspected insurgents since bombings in Baghdad’s Sadr City Shiite district killed more than 200 people the day before during widespread sectarian violence in the capital.

Followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned Friday they will suspend their membership in parliament and the Cabinet if Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki meets with U.S. President George W. Bush in Jordan next week, a member of parliament said. Bush and al-Maliki were scheduled to meet Wednesday and Thursday in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

The al-Sadr bloc in parliament and government is the back bone of al-Maliki’s political support, and its withdrawal, if only temporarily, would be a severe blow to the prime minister’s already shaky hold on power.

Legislator Qusai Abdul-Wahab, an al-Sadr follower, said in a statement that U.S. forces were to blame for Thursday’s bombings in Sadr City that killed 215 people and wounding 257 because they failed to provide security.


“We say occupation forces are fully responsible for these acts, and we call for the withdrawal of occupation forces or setting a timetable for their withdrawal,” Abdul-Wahab said.

Al-Sadr’s followers hold six Cabinet seats and have 30 members in the 275-member parliament.

The attack in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad, involved explosives hidden in a parked car and in a suicide belt worn by a pedestrian that detonated simultaneously outside a car dealership at 11 a.m., said police Brig. Khalaf al-Jubouri. He said the casualties - 22 dead, 26 wounded - were expected to rise.

The blasts came as funeral processions were taking place in Sadr City, Baghdad’s largest Shiite neighborhood, where the deadliest attack of the Iraq war had occurred Thursday. Hundreds of men, women and children beat their chests, chanted and cried as they walked beside vehicles carrying the caskets of their loved ones.

Baghdad remained under a 24-hour curfew aimed at stopping revenge attacks. But al-Maliki, himself a Shiite, ordered police to guard the processions carrying victims of Thursday’s attacks by Sunni Muslim insurgents for burial in Najaf, the holy Shiite city.


“God is great. There is no God but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah,” about 300 mourners chanted as they beat their chests while walking through the Sadr City slum alongside slow moving the cars and minivans carrying 16 wooden caskets tied to the rooftops. Some of the men and women repeatedly touched the sides of the vehicles or the caskets in an effort to say a final farewell to their relatives or friends.

Once the processions reached the edge of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad, the cars and minivans left most of the mourners behind and began the 100-mile drive south to Najaf, a treacherous journey that passes through many checkpoints and areas controlled by Sunni militants in Iraq’s so-called “Triangle of Death.”

As cleanup crews continued removing pieces of human flesh from wreckage of the car bomb attacks, tents were erected where the families of the dead could receive condolences from friends and relatives.

Meanwhile, three mortar rounds exploded near the Abu Hanifa mosque, Sunni Islam’s most important shrine in another area of Baghdad at 9:45 a.m. Friday, wounding one guard, said its sheik, Samir al-Obaidi.

In Baghdad’s mostly Shiite neighborhood of Hurriyah, clashes with a Shiite militia and Sunni insurgents armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades broke out near a Sunni mosque, residents said. No casualties were immediately reported in the fighting, which also involved mortars.


In addition to the curfew, Friday is a day of worship in mostly Muslim Iraq when many people have the day off work. For several months, the government has been imposing a 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. ban on vehicles on Fridays, forcing people to walk to their local mosques for services.

In the In well-coordinated Sadr City attack, Sunni insurgents blew up five car bombs and fired mortars, forcing Iraqi leaders into a meeting aimed at containing the growing sectarian war.

The attack surpassed coordinated blasts on March 2, 2004, that struck Shiite Muslim shrines in Karbala and Baghdad, killing a total of at least 181 Iraqis and wounding 573. A bombing in the southern city of Hillah that targeted mostly Shiite police and National Guard recruits, killed 125 and wounded more than 140 in February 2004.

Shiite mortar teams quickly retaliated to the Sadr City onslaught on Thursday, firing 10 shells that badly damaged the Abu Hanifa mosque in the Azamiya neighborhood and killed one person.

Eight more rounds slammed down near the offices of the Association of Muslim Scholars, the top Sunni Muslim organization in Iraq, setting nearby houses on fire. Two other mortar barrages on Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad killed nine and wounded 21, police said late Thursday.


The bloodshed underlined the impotence of the Iraqi army and police to quell determined sectarian extremists at a time when the United States appears to be considering a move to accelerate the hand-over of security responsibilities.

“We condemn such acts of senseless violence that are clearly aimed at undermining the Iraqi people’s hopes for a peaceful and stable Iraq,” White House spokesman Jeanie Mamo said in Washington.

On Thursday night, Iraq’s government imposed the curfew in the capital and also closed its international airport to all commercial flights. The transport ministry then took the highly unusual step of closing the airport and docks in the southern city of Basra, the country’s main outlet to the vital shipping lanes in the Gulf.

Leaders from Iraq’s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities issued a televised appeal for calm. Al-Maliki also went on state TV and blamed Sunni radicals and followers of Saddam Hussein for the attacks on Sadr City.

The coordinated car bombings - three by suicide drivers and two of parked cars - billowed black smoke up into clouds hanging low over blood-smeared streets jammed with twisted and charred cars and buses in the sprawling Shiite slum, which is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia of al-Sadr, a key al-Maliki backer.

The militia and associated death squads are believed responsible for the slayings of hundreds of Sunnis since suspected al-Qaida in Iraq militants bombed a revered Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra last February. That attack set off a surge of retaliatory killings between Shiites and Sunnis that have raged all year.

In a TV statement read by an aide, al-Sadr urged unity among his followers to end the U.S. “occupation” that he said is causing Iraq’s strife.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the pre-eminent Shiite religious figure in Iraq, condemned the bombings and issued condolences to family members of those who were killed. He called for self-control among his followers.

Iraq is suffering through a period of unparalleled violence.

The U.N. said Wednesday that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the most in any month since the war began 44 months ago, and a figure certain to be eclipsed in November. The U.N. said citizens were fleeing the country at a pace of 100,000 each month, and that at least 1.6 million Iraqis have left since the war began in March 2003.

The International Organization for Migration, a U.N.-associated group, said the number of Iraqis displaced by violence since Samarra has now risen to more than 1,000 people on average a day in September, October and November.

The Sadr City slaughter occurred moments after an attack by 30 masked Sunni gunmen who tried to storm the Shiite-dominated Health Ministry, about a mile west of the Shiite slum. Seven ministry guards were wounded.