The residents of Ramadi had had enough. As they frantically searched the city's hospital for relatives killed and wounded in bomb blasts at a police recruiting station Thursday, they did something they had never publicly done: They blamed al-Qaida in Iraq, the insurgent movement led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"Neither the Americans nor the Shiites have any benefit in doing this. It is Zarqawi," said Khalid Saadi, 42, who came to the hospital looking for his brother, Muhammed. Saadi said he hoped that sympathies in the city, considered a hotbed of support for the Sunni Arab insurgency, would turn against al-Zarqawi's faction.
The surviving police recruits showed where their sympathies lay - after the bombing, they got back in line to continue the screening process, the U.S. military said.
Saadi later learned that his brother was one of at least 130 people killed in attacks Thursday in Iraq, most occurring within an hour's time. The violence, which included a suicide bombing in Karbala, contributed to one of the bloodiest days since the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003.
The attacks came a day after insurgents killed 42 people at a funeral in the city of Muqdadiyah. Before Wednesday, the country had enjoyed a measure of calm and even optimism as rival politicians talked of arranging a broad-based coalition government after the Dec. 15 elections.
But the attacks Thursday suggested that the insurgents would remain an important force in the country's future.
At least 56 Sunni Arabs were killed and 60 wounded at the recruiting center in Ramadi, the capital of the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar, when a bomber standing among some 1,000 police recruits struck near the Ramadi Glass and Ceramics Works, said Mohammed al-Ani, a doctor at the city's hospital.
A police official in Karbala said 63 people were killed there.
Also, five American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the capital, the U.S. military said. In other violence, a car bomb killed three Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad, and gunmen killed three Iraqis in separate incidents, police said.
In the Ramadi attack, more than 1,000 men had gathered at the center to apply for new jobs with the Iraqi police, Marine Capt. Jeffrey Pool said in the statement. A suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest in the middle of the crowd, witnesses and Iraqi police said.
Wounded and panicked applicants surged forward in hopes of finding a way from the Jersey-walled entrance into the recruiting center, where another bomber was waiting to detonate an explosive belt, said one witness, Amar Oda, who was among those looking for a job.
"I just saw flesh and body parts festooning the cement barriers," Oda, 23, said from his hospital bed, where he was receiving medical treatment for wounds in his head and back.
Some of those killed were tribal leaders who had come to supervise the recruitment of residents into the country's police force, Majeed Tikriti, a doctor in Ramadi's hospital, said. Local leaders have repeatedly demanded that U.S. and Iraqi authorities allow men from Ramadi to serve in Iraq's armed forces. They had argued that only locally recruited soldiers could bring a measure of control to the city of 400,000 on the Euphrates River, which is considered one of the key centers of the Sunni-led insurgency.
Though U.S. and Iraqi authorities have been reluctant to allow this, on the grounds that locally recruited soldiers are vulnerable to coercion by insurgents, they have relented in recent weeks. Pool said in the statement that since recruiting began Monday, recruiters have screened 600 applicants who met basic requirements to join the police.
The Ramadi residents responded to the attack with fury. Nearly everyone at the scene said they believed it had been ordered by al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, considered the most ruthless and best-organized faction in the insurgent movement.
"People in this city helped Zarqawi a lot, and I hope this would make them change their minds," said Saad Abid Ali, a captain in the Iraqi army hit in the legs by shrapnel.
Another group of people beat a doctor in the hospital after he told an Iraqi journalist that U.S. forces were to blame for the attacks.
The scene was equally grim in Karbala, where another bomber wearing a vest packed with ball bearings detonated his explosives on a busy pedestrian path about 100 feet from the Imam Hussein shrine. Many of the victims were Shiite pilgrims who had gathered outside the Zainabiya gate to the shrine, an area flanked by first-floor markets and second- and third-story hotels.
The attack killed 63 and wounded 120, Karbala police spokesman Rahman Meshawi said. Eight of the dead were Shiite pilgrims from Iran.
Mohammed Saheb, who was wounded in the head, said he travels to the shrine every Thursday in advance of Friday prayers - as many pilgrims do.
"I never thought that such a crime could happen near this holy site," Saheb said. "The terrorists spare no place from their ugly deeds. This is a criminal act against faithful pilgrims. The terrorists are targeting the Shiites."
The bombing brought back memories of the deadliest civilian attack in Iraq since the war began. On March 2, 2004, coordinated blasts from suicide bombers, mortars and planted explosives detonated near shrines in Karbala and Baghdad, killing at least 181 people. Since then, however, Karbala had been relatively free of violence.
There apparently had been warnings of another attack.
A would-be suicide car bomber arrested on Tuesday before he could explode his vehicle told Karbala police a number of suicide bombers were in the city, said a police commander who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media. He refused to say if any others had been arrested.
Karbala's governor, Aqeel al-Khazraji, blamed "takfiris and Saddamists" for the attack. The takfiri ideology is followed by extremist Sunnis bent on killing anyone they consider an infidel, even fellow Muslims.
Footage on Iraqi television showed police in the city center shouting and waving pistols and assault rifles in an effort to control a crowd of onlookers. The ground appeared to be wet, and lumps of clothing and flesh lay scattered across the bloodstained street. Police and emergency workers loaded bodies onto wooden carts and pushed them away.
The al-Iraqiya television network showed a pickup truck pulling away from the scene, black body bags piled in its bed.
At the city's hospital, doctors worked to save the lives of the wounded and make an accounting of the dead. More than 150 people, many crying, jostled for a glance at a list of names of people killed in the attack. |
