Iraq suffered one of its bloodiest days of violence on Sunday after attackers struck two markets in a Shia area of Baghdad, killing at least 44 people and wounding more than 200. The killers struck with three car bombs and four mortars, causing pandemonium in Sadr City.
Dozens of market stalls and vehicles were destroyed as the explosives ripped through the poor neighbourhood at peak shopping time, just before sundown, as residents bought provisions for their evening meal. The attack sparked a frantic search for survivors as residents put charred corpses into ambulances and trucks to be taken away. Police said they defused a third car bomb.
The area was quickly sealed off by the Mahdi Army militia of the radical anti-American Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The use of a suicide bomber in one of the car bombs pointed to the attack being the work of al-Qaida in Iraq, which has said it hopes to start a Shia-Sunni civil conflict.
Shia leaders feared such an attack was coming after their fighters took revenge on Sunnis and their mosques for the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra last month. The Iraqi Islamic party, the country’s largest Sunni group, said the bombings were ”carried out by the enemies of our nation who don’t like to see Iraqis united or living in a stable country”.
United States peace activists on Sunday prayed for the killers of Tom Fox, a US Quaker who was abducted in Baghdad in November and found dead last week.
Norman Kember, a retired British professor of medicine, and two Canadian members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, were seized with Fox by a previously unknown group, Swords of Righteousness Brigades. They were shown last week on a video, but Fox was absent. His body was found on a rubbish dump. He had been shot and his hands were bound, police said.
”I pray for those who persecuted and killed him. I pray for the people of Iraq,” Bob Sekinger, a member of the Hopewell Centre in Clear Brook, Virginia, where Fox worshipped, told reporters on Sunday after a short memorial service. Sekinger said his murdered friend knew the dangers of Baghdad, but considered his risk minimal compared with the number of Iraqis killed. Another member of his Quaker meeting, Marge Epstein, said: ”Tom left his life as we know it with a clear sense that after 9/11 he felt he needed to do something very concrete to help create peace in the world”.
In the West Bank town of Jayyus, where Fox had protested against Israeli bulldozers destroying olive groves and building the ”separation” barrier, Palestinians also mourned. – Guardian Unlimited Â