Curfew imposed after Baghdad carnage
November 23 2006 at 07:46PM
By Ross Colvin and Alastair Macdonald
Baghdad - Six car bombs killed 133 people in a Shi'ia stronghold in Baghdad on Thursday, one of the most devastating attacks since the US invasion and likely to inflame sectarian passions in a nation sliding toward civil war.
The authorities slapped an indefinite curfew on the city.
A further 201 people were wounded in the bombings, police said. The Health Minister said the toll would rise. "Many of the dead have been reduced to scattered body parts and are not counted yet," Ali al-Shemari told Reuters.
The blasts came at the same time as gunmen surrounded and fired on the Shi'a-run Health Ministry in one of the boldest daylight assaults by militants in Baghdad. Mortars later crashed down on a nearby Sunni enclave in an apparent reprisal attack.
Six parked vehicles each packed with as much as 100kg of explosives devastated streets and a crowded market in the sprawling Sadr City slum in east Baghdad, Major General Jihad al-Jabori of the Interior Ministry told state television.
Mortars also landed nearby and residents seized a seventh car they said was driven by a would-be suicide bomber, he added.
Bloodied remains lay amid mangled vehicle wrecks. Fierce fires were left blazing after the attacks. At one hospital, the bloodied bodies of children lay untended in the corridors.
Heavily guarded and policed by the Mehdi Army militia of radical Shi'a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, Sadr City was until in this year relatively unscathed by attacks by al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgents. A string of bombings against civilians there in recent months have been seen as a declaration of war on the militia, which Sunnis blame for a wave of death squad violence.
The bloodshed may heighten sectarian anger after a week of tension inside the U.S.-backed national unity government. Washington is pressing Shi'ite and minority Sunni leaders to rein in militants to halt a slide towards all-out civil war.
The Sunni speaker of parliament called for calm and said Iraqis faced a "common enemy". But one Shi'a politician, Sami al-Askari, called for the arrest of the main Sunni leader in parliament, Adnan al-Dulaimi, for inciting sectarian violence.
Five people were wounded at the Health Ministry, about 5 km from Sadr City, an Interior Ministry source said, when guerrillas fired mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns into the compound. The arrival of US helicopters and troops dispersed the assailants, ministry employees said.
Shortly afterwards, a dozen mortar rounds hit Adhamiya, an enclave of Iraq's Sunni minority in mainly Shi'a east Baghdad. The Interior Ministry said 10 people were wounded in the attack.
The Health Ministry is run by followers of Sadr, whose Mehdi Army is accused by many Sunnis of being behind some of the worst death squad violence in the capital, in which thousands of people have been kidnapped and tortured and their bodies dumped.
The United Nations said on Wednesday violent deaths among civilians had hit a record of over 3 700 in October, although Health Minister Shemari insisted it was much lower.
In the worst attacks in Iraq, 171 people were killed in a series of bombings at Shi'a religious ceremonies in 2004.
At the Health Ministry building a deputy minister accused the Iraqi army of failing to heed calls for help. It took the arrival of US helicopters and ground troops to disperse the attackers, a ministry employee told Reuters after the assault.
While the United States says many police and army units are suspected of being loyal to Shi'a groups, some, particularly in the army, are believed to have links to Sunni leaders.
Sectarian tension has mounted this month, notably over attacks and kidnaps by men in uniform. Dozens of civil servants were abducted last week from the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry by suspected Shi'a militiamen from Sadr City.
Sunnis were also incensed last week by an arrest warrant issued for their most senior cleric, Harith al-Dari.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, due to meet US President George Bush in Jordan, has vowed to disband militias loyal to fellow Shi'a leaders like Sadr, a key ally, but he has resisted pressure from some in Washington to speed that up.
(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami, Mussab Al-Khairalla, Ahmed Rasheed, Claudia Parsons, Alastair Macdonald and Stuart McDill)