Baghdad, Iraq – The start of a new week in war-torn Iraq closely resembled the worst days of the previous week, as two bombs in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood and a massive charge hidden in a car in the northern city of Kirkuk killed at least 66 Iraqis on Sunday, police and military officials said.
The intense violence that made last week one of the deadliest of the year in Iraq resumed Sunday morning when two bombs exploded in Sadr City, a huge slum populated mostly by impoverished Shiite Muslims.
The first was a car bomb that detonated at 9:30 a.m. in Sadr City’s Jamila district, on a busy traffic circle where a popular open market and a police station are located. An Interior Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Raad Muhammad, said the bomb killed 48 people – six of them police officers and most of the rest day laborers waiting for work – and wounded 65; the Defense Ministry reported 34 dead and 73 wounded.
A few minutes later, a roadside bomb went off in the same area, killing eight civilians and wounding 20, the Defense Ministry said.
Three weeks ago, a car bomb at a market in the same area killed about 60 people.
Sadr City is a major stronghold of the Shiite movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical cleric whose Mahdi Army militia is widely accused of engineering much of Iraq’s current wave of sectarian killing. Iraqi troops and their U.S. advisers raided a Sadr City neighborhood before dawn Sunday in a bid to capture men accused of participating in death squads. After an exchange of gunfire, the soldiers detained eight suspected insurgents and freed two hostages, the U.S. military said.
A spokesman for al-Sadr, Sahib al-Amiry, condemned the raid and the bombings, which he called “evidence that the Iraqi government is weak.”
In Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed and perpetually tense oil center 160 miles north of Baghdad, a massive car bomb near a courthouse killed 24 civilians and set fire to a broad section of the city center. Kirkuk police Col. Adnan Muhammad called the midday attack the bloodiest incident in the city since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.
The bomb, fashioned from more than a ton of explosives and several mines and detonated by remote control, ignited an inferno that continued to burn into the evening. Television news footage showed a mass of thick, black smoke engulfing blocks of small, mostly wooden shops.
More than 50 seriously burned people were rushed to hospitals in Irbil and Sulaymaniyah because of a shortage of blood and anesthetic at Kir kuk’s health facilities, Muhammad said.
