Shopkeepers and homeowners in Baghdad cleared rubble and looked for bodies on Friday, the morning after a series of explosions devastated homes and a bazaar just before nightfall, killing up to 50 people.
Some five times that number were injured, the health minister said, and hospitals were packed with the wounded.
Speculation swirled about the causes of the blasts, which came as families gathered for the start of the Muslim weekend and as United States President George Bush launched a pre-election round of speeches to rally Americans to maintain their military presence in Iraq as part of a wider war on Islamist ”terrorists”.
A senior Interior Ministry official and sources in police headquarters and at some of the seven main blast sites were adamant that a salvo of Katyusha rockets had done the damage in neighbourhoods across the mainly Shi’ite east of the city.
They rejected an account from an army general who told state television militants had planted explosives and detonated them in a coordinated attack. That version, nonetheless, had support from shopkeepers in the Amin district, who struggled to explain the extent of the devastation of their two-storey market.
With twisted steel and cabling and fallen concrete filling much of the main walkway of the souk, the blast appeared to have been greater than that made by a typical Katyusha rocket.
”I was sitting in my shop with some customers. I didn’t feel anything but then the shop came down on our heads,” said Hamza Ali, his head bandaged, as storeowners swept away debris and youths poked in the rubble to salvage stock from clothing shops.
”Maybe they planted this — some people just rented a shop behind us.”
In another area, police said an apartment block collapsed.
The Interior Ministry official put the death toll at 50, while other police sources put it at 43. Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said 257 people were treated for wounds. No official would say who was responsible.
The attack was the deadliest after several bloody days in Baghdad as militants defy a major security crackdown which officials had said had sharply reduced the death rate.
US reinforcements
Along with the arrival of US armoured reinforcements in a southern city where Iraqi troops and Shi’ite militiamen fought to a bloody standstill this week, it underlined the scale of the task facing Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
He said his new, US-trained forces would be able to take charge of security in most of Iraq by the end of the year. But after a month that saw US deaths up nearly 50 percent to at least 64, US troop levels are at their highest since January and up 10%on July at 140 000, the Pentagon said.
A website used by Sunni militants published a statement purportedly from al-Qaeda’s umbrella organisation in Iraq. It renewed the sort of call for a holy war on the Shi’ite majority that many fear could help provoke all-out sectarian civil war.
In the first of several speeches round the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Bush told veterans in Salt Lake City on Thursday: ”If America were to pull out before Iraq could defend itself, the consequences would be absolutely predictable and absolutely disastrous. We would be handing Iraq over to our worst enemies.
”They would have a new sanctuary … with huge oil riches.”
Opposition Democrats, eyeing gains in November’s elections to Congress, are pushing for a timetable for US withdrawal. – Reuters