Baghdad, Iraq – Beleaguered police fired shots into the air to calm a seething crowd at the scene of yet another deadly car bombing in the Iraqi capital.
But a middle-aged woman in a head scarf and flowing black abaya hardly seemed to notice.
As officers tried to clear the street around a charred and overturned minibus and the Muslim call to prayer echoed from a nearby minaret, she put her hands to her face and began to cry. But she was mourning no one in particular, she said.
“All those Iraqis, they are just like my sons and my brothers dying every day for no reason,” she said, her eyes red from weeping. “No reason.”
At least 17 more Iraqis were killed in attacks by insurgents Thursday, including 14 in the commercial district of New Baghdad, where about 60 others were wounded, an Interior Ministry official said. A white sedan detonated at 11 a.m., blackening nearby storefronts. An hour earlier, a car bomb in the northern city of Kirkuk had killed a bakery owner and his 9-year-old son.
Iraqi Brig. Gen. Ayad Imad Mahdi was slain on his way to work at 7 a.m., a Defense Ministry spokesman said. Two Opel sedans pulled alongside his vehicle, and gunmen riddled it with bullets.
Also on Thursday, U.S. military officials announced that two soldiers had been killed in roadside bomb attacks, one in eastern Baghdad and the other near the city of Samarra.
Their names were withheld pending notification of their families.
The attacks continued a relentless wave of violence that the new government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari says it is determined to control but seems powerless to stop.
In the western province of Anbar, U.S. Marines continued to battle insurgents near the Syrian border. Refugees fled the town of Ramana, where some of the heaviest clashes have occurred. Using loudspeakers, U.S. troops asked people to raise their arms or wave white flags as they left town on foot.
