Car bombs killed more than 170 people in Baghdad on Wednesday, hours after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Iraq will take security control of the whole country from foreign forces by the end of the year.
One car bomb alone in the mainly Shi’ite al-Sadriya neighbourhood killed 122 people and wounded 155, police said.
The apparently coordinated attacks — there were five within a short space of time — occurred hours after Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Iraq will take security control of the whole country from foreign forces by the end of the year.
More than 200 people were wounded in total.
Al-Maliki is under growing pressure to say when United States troops will leave, but the attacks in mainly Shi’ite areas of Baghdad underscored the huge security challenges.
Police said the bomb in the central al-Sadriya neighbourhood, possibly placed in a bus, exploded at a busy intersection near a popular market. Reuters witnesses said many women and children were among the dead.
In another attack, a suicide car bomber struck at a checkpoint in Sadr City, the Shi’ite stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. A third car bomb attack in the capital killed 10 people, police said.
“I saw dozens of dead bodies. Some people were burned alive inside minibuses. Nobody could reach them after the explosion,” said one of the Reuters witnesses at al-Sadriya, describing scenes of mayhem. “There were pieces of flesh all over the place. Women were screaming and shouting for their loved ones who died.”
One man waving his arms in the air screamed hysterically: “Where’s Maliki? Let him come and see what is happening here.”
Sectarian strife
The attacks could inflame sectarian passions in Baghdad, especially among al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia, which has been keeping a low profile since the new security crackdown began.
Al-Sadr withdrew his six ministers from al-Maliki’s Cabinet on Monday to press for a pull-out timetable for the 146Â 000 US troops in Iraq.
Baghdad has been the epicentre of violence in Iraq since suspected al-Qaeda militants blew up a holy Shi’ite shrine in the city of Samarra in February last year.
Sectarian death squads killings have declined in the capital under the two-month-old security offensive. But car bombs are much harder to stop, US military officials say.
In a speech delivered on his behalf at a ceremony marking the handover of southern Maysan province from British to Iraqi control, al-Maliki said three provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region will be next, followed by Kerbala and Wasit provinces.
“Then it will be province by province until we achieve [this transfer] before the end of the year,” al-Maliki said in the speech delivered by National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie.
Maysan is the fourth of Iraq’s 18 provinces to be handed to Iraqi security forces, joining Muthanna, Najaf and Dhi Qar, all predominantly Shi’ite and relatively calm regions in the south.
Al-Maliki says Iraq’s security forces will only take back control from foreign forces when ready, and he urged patience.
“Some people have demanded a timetable to end the foreign presence in Iraq,” al-Maliki said in his speech read at the ceremony in the Maysan capital, Amara, 365km south of Baghdad. “I tell them this is the demand of every patriotic person [and] … we are working to create the objective circumstances for this withdrawal.” — Reuters, AFP
With additional reporting by Ross Colvin in Amara, and Aseel Kami and Ibon Villelabeitia in Baghdad