Bomb attacks around Baghdad killed at least 19 people and wounded 80 on Tuesday as insurgents defied a security crackdown in the Iraqi capital.
The first blast echoed around the city at dawn, when a roadside booby trap ripped open a minibus and a taxi in the downtown Nahda area, killing nine people and wounding eight, an interior ministry official said.
Almost immediately afterwards, two more blasts targeted a police patrol nearby, wounding three officers, he added.
Four hours later, two more bombs detonated in rapid succession in the crowded Shorjah market. Ten people were killed and 69 wounded in the blasts, which set fire to several shops and sent a thick plume of black smoke above the skyline.
The attacks were the second in the space of a week on Shorjah. Five days ago 10 people were killed there when an explosive-laden moped detonated.
Five more Baghdadis were killed on Tuesday in a bank robbery.
Gunmen in three cars raided the al-Rasheed Bank in north central Baghdad, killing three guards and two bank employees. They escaped with seven million dinars (less than $5 000), an interior ministry official said.
The continued bombing is a direct challenge to efforts by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government to win back control of the capital and halt what many see as Iraq’s slide towards civil war.
His two-month-old security plan — Operation Forward Together — has so far made little impact on the daily toll of bombings and death squad killings, but more military reinforcements are being sent to the city.
Al-Maliki’s United States allies have also responded to the threat. More than 10 000 coalition troops are now supporting Forward Together, following the arrival on the weekend of the 3 700-strong 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
”The situation in Baghdad is very difficult right now,” the US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said on Tuesday in an interview with ABC television.
”And we are working very closely with the new Iraqi government to improve the plan we had in place, to bring security in Baghdad,” he said.
Casey said Iraq was still a long way from a complete collapse of government and security forces or a civil war but that ”the levels of sectarian violence in Baghdad in the last probably six weeks are higher than they’ve ever been.”
Additional US and Iraqi troops are to be deployed to flashpoint mixed districts of the city, where violence between Sunnis and Shi’ites is at its worst, in order to quell the fighting, he said.
Tuesday’s bombings, likely to be blamed on Sunni extremists attacking Baghdad’s Shi’ite majority and seeking to undermine the government, can be expected to feed the cycle of revenge attacks by Shi’ite death squads.
Such killings leave about a dozen tortured corpses in the streets and waterways of Baghdad every day. According to the United Nations, nearly 6 000 Iraqis were killed in May and June alone, mostly in Baghdad.
Government and coalition security forces have vowed to stop the killers, but on Monday found themselves drawn into a clash with the Mehdi Army militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr when they carried out a raid in east Baghdad.
The clash, which killed three civilians, underlined the delicate political situation. Both al-Maliki, a Shi’ite, and President Jalal Talabani expressed concern over the raid, and al-Sadr’s supporters denounced it as a provocation.
Violence and unrest continued elsewhere in Iraq.
A doctor working at a hospital morgue in Kut, 175km south-east of Baghdad, said he had received the bullet-riddled corpses of seven Iraqi border guards found in Kharqush, a village on the Iranian border. — AFP
