Dozens of children were killed on Thursday when three car bombs exploded in a coordinated attack in Baghdad that left 44 people dead and more than 200 injured.
Health ministry officials said at least 34 of those killed were children. Dozens more were injured. Many suffered shrapnel wounds; others had limbs amputated.
The explosion, shortly after 1pm, was apparently aimed at a crowd that had gathered to mark the opening of a sewage plant west of the capital. Witnesses said United States soldiers were handing out sweets to children at the time.
”The Americans called us, they told us come here, come here, asking us if we wanted sweets. We went beside them, then a car exploded,” Abdel Rahmad Dawoud, 12, told Associated Press from his bed at the Yarmuk emergency hospital. He suffered shrapnel wounds.
As survivors rushed to help the injured, the second and third cars detonated, also hitting a US military convoy that arrived at the scene. Ten American soldiers were injured, two seriously.
The group led by Islamist militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which is holding the British engineer Kenneth Bigley, said it was behind the attacks.
In a separate attack, a suicide bomber detonated his car at an American checkpoint in Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, killing two Iraqi policemen and an American soldier and injuring 60 people. Four Iraqi civilians were also killed in a car bombing near a police convoy in Tal Afar, in the north, making September the bloodiest month for car bombs in Iraq.
Another US soldier died when a rocket hit a US logistics base near the capital.
American troops sealed off the scene of the first blast, in the al-Amer district. Several soldiers from Iraq’s National Guard were also among the injured.
”This attack was carried out by evil people who do not want the Iraqis to celebrate and don’t want reconstruction projects in Iraq,” said Lieutenant Ahmad Saad, a member of the national guard at the scene.
The US military described the bombing as part of a coordinated campaign. ”These attacks continue a campaign of terror that does nothing more than harm the Iraqi people.”
Ten people — two Indonesian women, six Iraqis, and two Lebeanese — working for an electricity company were kidnapped by a militant group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq.
The US military launched a strike at a house in the insurgent stronghold of Falluja, west of Baghdad, which it said it had been used by supporters of Zarqawi.
Despite the campaign of car bombs and kidnapping, the Iraqi government insists that it will go ahead with the first national elections, scheduled for January.
”We are certain that by January most of the Iraqi people will be able to vote, if not all,” the prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said in a speech in London on Thursday. – Guardian Unlimited Â