Baghdad, Iraq – A car bomb exploded near an outdoor market in a poor, dusty Shiite village east of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 30 Iraqis and wounding 48 as a new spate of sectarian bloodshed continued for a fourth day.
Iraqi authorities said the deaths were among at least 40 reported throughout the country. The four-day death toll from politically motivated violence rose to at least 250.
Police said the blast in the Nahrawan district, a bleak agricultural region of dirt roads, mud-brick homes and impoverished Shiite farmers about 20 miles from Baghdad, was caused by a car parked near a public market that exploded about 6:30 p.m. as residents gathered to mingle and buy food.
The explosion destroyed cars and damaged shops. Police said that 30 minutes after the initial blast, insurgents fired mortar rounds into the area, sowing panic and chaos as police attempted to seal off the area and care for victims.
Victims were rushed to hospitals in eastern Baghdad.
“They’re getting many casualties,” said a receptionist at Baghdad’s Kindi Hospital, where some of the victims were taken. “All our staff is trying to save people.”
Sunni Arab insurgents from Iraq and abroad have launched a campaign of car bombings and killings against U.S.-led forces and the nation’s Shiite majority, apparently hoping to provoke a civil war that will radicalize Sunnis in Iraq and the region.
The latest onslaught began after U.S. soldiers and forces of the Shiite-led government completed a counterinsurgency in the northern city of Tall Afar, which allegedly had become a base for foreign fighters and Iraqi militants.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who claims to lead al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch, declared war on Shiites for their actions in Tall Afar, which some Iraqi critics decried as “sectarian cleansing” against the city’s Sunnis. Low-scale violence between Sunnis and Shiites has continued for months.
