Iraq’s government renewed its pledge to crack down on militants after a massive suicide truck bomb killed 135 people in a mainly Shi’ite area of Baghdad.
Saturday’s attack was the deadliest single bombing since the United States-led invasion in 2003. It shocked even Iraqis accustomed to relentless violence that threatens to plunge the country into full-scale sectarian civil war.
Around 1 000 people have been killed across Iraq in the past week in suicide bombings, mortar bomb attacks and fighting between security forces and militants, according to figures compiled by Reuters from official sources.
”What did we do?” said one elderly man as he wailed in front of gutted shopfronts and homes in the Sadriya market on Sunday.
Residents wandered the normally bustling street in central Baghdad, staring at masses of tangled concrete and steel hanging from what was left of the two and three-storey buildings. A bulldozer had been called in to clear rubble.
Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed the blast on Saddam Hussein supporters and other Sunni militants.
”We are determined to root out [the perpetrators of] these crimes and cut off their roots, their sources and their supporters,” Maliki’s office said in a statement late on Saturday.
Maliki vowed in January to launch a crackdown in the capital to crush insurgents who have defied attempts by his government to get control of security, but it has not yet begun.
US President George Bush is sending 21 500 reinforcements to Iraq, most earmarked for the Baghdad offensive, despite vocal opposition at home, especially among Democrats who now control both houses of Congress.
Ordinary Iraqis are increasingly frustrated at the government’s inability to curb the violence.
”We are fed up with the government falling short in protecting us. After four years our blood still flows,” said Abu Sajad (37) a worker living in the Sadriya area.
In fresh violence on Sunday, a mortar bomb killed a woman and two children in a mixed neighbourhood in central Baghdad, residents said.
More than 300 people were wounded in the Sadriya blast, caused when the bomber drove his truck, packed with one tonne of explosives, into the crowded market.
The planned US-Iraqi offensive in Baghdad is seen as a last-ditch effort to stem worsening bloodshed between minority Sunni Arabs and politically dominant majority Shi’ites.
Similar crackdowns in the capital have failed in the past.
Maliki’s critics say an offensive last summer failed because the Iraqi army committed too few troops and because he was reluctant to confront the Mehdi Army militia of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a key political ally.
The Pentagon has said the Mehdi Army now poses a greater threat to peace in Iraq than Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda.
A US intelligence report said on Friday that escalating sectarian violence met the definition of civil war.
The report also said a rapid withdrawal of US forces would lead to massive civilian casualties and possible intervention in the conflict by Iraq’s neighbours. – Reuters