At least 17 people were killed on Sunday when a suicide bomber exploded his vehicle among day labourers waiting to be hired in the central Iraq city of Hilla, scene of some of the deadliest sectarian bomb attacks.
Police in the mainly Shi’ite city 100km south of Baghdad said 49 people were wounded in the early morning blast, when hot shrapnel tore through the crowd of workers as they gathered around the bomber’s minibus.
”I was standing with other labourers when the minibus came and the driver asked for labourers. Everybody ran towards him and then he exploded his car,” Ali Mohammed told Reuters as he lay in a local hospital, his left thigh bandaged.
His life was probably saved by the fact that he was slow in reaching the vehicle and was standing at the back of the crowd when the bomb exploded.
”I saw the fire and collapsed on the ground,” he said.
The blast came against a backdrop of continuing bloodshed between majority Shi’ites and minority Sunnis that has killed thousands of Iraqis and raised fears that the country is teetering on the edge of all-out civil war.
Hilla, close to the site of ancient Babylon, is surrounded by Sunni rural areas that are havens for insurgents and al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
It has seen some of the deadliest sectarian bomb attacks over the past two years, including the bloodiest single blast in Iraq, when 125 people, many of them police recruits, were killed by a suicide car bomber in February 2005.
In August, a bomb apparently left on a parked bicycle blasted a crowd of young Iraqi men outside an army recruiting office killing 12 people.
Sunday’s blast followed the killing of a prominent Shi’ite Islamist politician on Saturday in what looked like a sectarian assassination.
Ali al-Adhadh of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq was shot dead with his wife as he drove in mainly Sunni west Baghdad.
Minority Sunni Arabs were enraged last week after a warrant of arrest was issued for leading Iraqi Sunni cleric Harith al-Dari on charges of inciting terrorism, accusing the Shi’ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sectarianism.
Maliki’s six-month-old national unity government has struggled to curb the rampant sectarian violence gripping Iraq but is coming under growing US pressure to show some progress in reaching a political accommodation with Sunnis and reining in militias blamed for much of the bloodshed.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appealed to Iraqis not to let the sectarianism destroy their country.
Rice said during a visit to Vietnam on Saturday that Iraqis ”have one future and that is a future together. They don’t have a future if they try to stay apart”. — Reuters