Baghdad, Iraq – Insurgents struck Baghdad with at least a dozen attacks Wednesday that targeted Shiite Muslim civilians, Iraqi security forces and American troops, killing more than 160 people in the deadliest day of violence in the capital since the U.S. invasion.
Today dawned with more violence. At least 10 policemen and five civilians were killed at 8 a.m. when a suicide bomber drove his car into a convoy of police vehicles in southern Baghdad, police said.
U.S. military officials said Wednesday’s day-long waves of suicide bombings, rocket attacks and shootings across the city bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the radical Sunni Muslim insurgent organization led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The group did not immediately assert direct responsibility for the attacks, but an Internet statement issued in its name welcomed the start of “the revenge battles throughout the land of Mesopotamia.”
The statement linked the attacks to a U.S. and Iraqi offensive underway against insurgents in the northern city of Tall Afar, and a subsequent audio recording attributed to al-Zarqawi that was posted on the Internet accused the Shiite-led Iraqi government of having declared war on the Sunnis of Tall Afar.
As a result, al-Qaeda in Iraq “has decided to launch a comprehensive war on the Shiites all over Iraq, wherever and whenever they are found. This is revenge. … Take care, because we are not going to have mercy on you,” the recording said, according to a translation by the Washington- based SITE Institute, a group that monitors radical websites.
The attacks appeared calculated to undermine public faith in the ability of the fledgling government to protect its people, by showing that insurgents can strike in Baghdad despite the U.S. and Iraqi military efforts to stop them.
Some of Wednesday’s attacks were carried out in ways that maximized death tolls.
In northwest Baghdad, a driver in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiyah pulled up alongside a gathering point for day laborers and offered jobs, witnesses said.
He waited until a crowd of workers had clustered around his four-door car, then detonated explosives packed inside, said 20-year-old Salim Hussein, who witnessed the attack.
The blast killed at least 112 people and wounded hundreds.
Men ran fingers down pages and pages of names of bombing victims posted outside the hospital, looking for loved ones.
“Why haven’t they killed Sad dam?” wailed a Shiite woman as she walked away from the hospital. “Cut his head off.”
Within an hour of the first attack, another driver smashed his car into two other vehicles at an intersection, then blew up his car in a fireball when a crowd gathered, police said. At least 15 people died, police Lt. Mustafa Majid said.
“I saw people’s bodies flying in the air and thrown for yards,” minibus-taxi driver Amer Salman said.
More attacks were mounted throughout the day, signaled by rattling booms, black smoke and U.S. military helicopters shuttling across the sky.
Rumors spread that more car bombers were roaming the city and that men wearing suicide belts were infiltrating hospitals.
The other attacks included two car bombings that killed a total of 26 people, one that targeted an Iraqi army convoy and killed three soldiers, and two that hit U.S. military convoys.
In Taji, a town north of Baghdad, men wearing Iraqi security-force uniforms dragged 17 men out of their homes, then handcuffed, blindfolded and shot them, news agencies said.
