Iraq’s fledgling government stood accused of leaving its citizens defenceless on Sunday after a devastating three days of suicide attacks left at least 150 people dead and more than 260 wounded.
In the deadliest bombing, one of at least 10 on Saturday, more than 98 people were killed and 130 were injured in the town of Musayyib, south of the capital, after a suicide bomber blew up a fuel tanker near a crowded marketplace and in front of a Shia mosque.
Four more suicide bombs exploded in and around Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 22 people and wounding 19.
A bomb in south-east Baghdad killed five members of Iraq’s independent electoral commission.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed in an internet statement that the bombings were part of a campaign to take control of Bagh dad. So far this month there have been more than 40 suicide attacks, which have claimed 269 lives and wounded 558.
Amid the deepening security crisis in the capital, the first of a series of charges against Saddam Hussein were announced on Sunday. The judge in charge of Iraq’s special tribunal said proceedings against the former dictator would begin ”within a few days”, though the trial is not expected until September. Saddam and three others have been charged with the killings of Shia Muslims in the village of Dujail in 1982.
Meanwhile a US soldier was killed and two others wounded in a bombing in central Iraq on Sunday, the US military said.
The soldier was killed when a homemade bomb exploded near Balad, 80km north of Baghdad, and the two wounded soldiers were taken to a military medical facility.
In London, the Ministry of Defence identified the three British soldiers killed by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq on Saturday. The MoD said the three men were from the 1st Battalion Staffordshire Regiment, which has been in Iraq since April. The number brought to 92 the number of British soldiers who have died in Iraq, including 53 killed in action.
The explosion in the mainly Shia town of Musayyib, on the Euphrates river, was Iraq’s most lethal suicide attack since the Shia-led administration of Ibrahim al Jafferi took office on April 28.
Shia Arab communities in Baghdad and in the so-called ”triangle of death” to the south of the capital have been a regular target of suicide bombers. Witnesses to Saturday’s bombing described the events as ”nightmarish”, blaming Sunni militants from nearby Latifiya.
The unprecedented scale of the attacks — 17 bombings in 72 hours in the Baghdad area alone — provoked angry reactions in the Iraqi Parliament.
Assembly members railed against the government for its apparent powerlessness to stem the bloodshed and there were calls for popular militias to step in. ”The plans of the interior ministry and defence ministry to impose security have failed,” said Khudair al-Kuzai, a senior assembly member. ”It is time to bring back the militias.”
Sheikh Salah al-Obeidi, the Najaf representative of the rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said: ”Iraqis are being killed as they work, as they shop, as they pray. I blame the interior and defence ministries which are infiltrated with Ba’athists and must do whatever the occupation forces order.”
As bulldozers cleared the wreckage of cars caught up in the blast in Musayyib on Sunday, residents protested at the lack of security.
One man shouted: ”The police banned trucks from entering Musayyib, yet they let in a fuel tanker. This is a crime! The police are all agents [of the insurgency].”
Suicide bombing in Iraq was almost unheard of before the fall of the Ba’athist regime. But since the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003, there have been 400 suicide attacks. – Guardian Unlimited Â