A car bomb tore into a crowd of laborers in central Baghdad Wednesday, killing at least 88 in Iraq’s worst single attack since February. A fireball engulfed men who gathered in Khadhimiya, a poor Shiite district with high unemployment, hoping for a day’s work gardening or building. Police at the scene said the bomb was detonated remotely, but some survivors claimed a suicide bomber had lured a crowd to his minivan.
It was the bloodiest attack in a wave of bombings and shootings Wednesday that left more than 150 people dead and 500 wounded. More than a dozen bombs shook the capital in a series of apparently coordinated blasts that started at dawn with the slaughter in Khadhimiya.
Health Ministry officials said 88 died, while the Interior Ministry put the toll at 114, not far off the 125 killed in a suicide attack in Hilla in February. Police said nearly 500 pounds of explosives were used.
Another car bomb, thought to have been detonated by a suicide bomber, immolated 11 people in a queue to refill gas canisters. In the town of Taji just north of Baghdad, 17 Shiite men were dragged from their homes and executed by gunmen in military uniform.
An Internet statement purportedly from al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for the carnage and said it was a reprisal for the joint American and Iraqi army offensive in the town of Tal Afar near the Syrian border. Thousands of troops swept through the insurgent stronghold this week, killing and capturing more than 300 suspected militants. The government trumpeted the operation as a major victory over the resistance.
The Internet statement said the radical Islamist group’s response was a nationwide suicide bombing campaign. “We would like to congratulate the Muslim nation and inform it the battle to avenge the Sunnis of Tal Afar has begun. Our brigades have joyfully set off to uphold their religion through death.”
Wednesday’s attacks exposed the government’s inability to protect citizens from a sectarian campaign against the majority Shiites. Al-Qaida and other extremist factions within the Sunni Arab resistance consider Shiites apostates and American collaborators. Targeting civilians is seen as an attempt to spark a backlash and spread chaos.
Shiite clerics and politicians have restrained their followers, but the Shiite-dominated security forces are accused of abusing and murdering Sunnis, edging the country closer to full-scale civil war.
A recent lull in violence had prompted rumors that an onslaught was being prepared. An Oct. 15 referendum on a draft constitution, rejected by many Sunnis as a plot by Shiites and Kurds to break up Iraq, deepened the foreboding.
The attack in Taji, a rural town with Shiite and Sunni residents, happened before dawn. The 17 victims were assembled in the town square and shot, said one witness. Hours later, as daylight broke over the capital, hundreds of men huddled in Oruba Square, the heart of Shiite Khadhimiya, hoping for a day’s casual labor.
“We gathered and suddenly a car blew up and turned the area into fire and dust and darkness,” said a survivor named Hadi. As bodies and vehicles burned, the able-bodied carried and wheeled the wounded on carts.
It was the same area where about 1,000 Shiite pilgrims died in a stampede on Aug. 31 sparked by fears of a suicide bomber. Sunni Arabs who saved some pilgrims from drowning in the Tigris River were hailed then as symbols of reconciliation, but Wednesday there was only anguish and rage.
“There’s no political party here; there are no police,” said another survivor, Mohammed Jabbar. “This targeted civilians, innocents. Why women and children?”
At least 12 other bombs shook the capital until 4 p.m., sending plumes of smoke into a balmy blue sky. Most appeared to have been detonated remotely rather than by would-be martyrs.
A bomb near a Shiite cleric’s office killed five and wounded 24. Other bombs targeted U.S. and Iraqi troops and Western security contractors, killing at least nine Iraqis and wounding two Americans.
Hospitals struggled to cope with the influx of people with missing limbs and bad burns. Depending on the corpses’ condition, the dead were stacked on stretchers or shoveled into garbage bags.
It was meant to be nothing more than a family gathering, a chance for Hilal Jedda’s four London-based children to meet their Iraqi relatives. Last September they flew to United Arab Emirates, sailed to Basra and drove to Baghdad. The relatives did not have British visas and Iraq was the only place they could be together.
An unconventional choice given the violence, but Jedda, a naturalized Briton, also planned to use the monthlong visit to lobby the British Embassy for visas for his two Iraq-based wives, hoping to return with them to London.
But on Oct. 10 American and Iraqi troops stormed the family’s house in Baghdad, put a hood over Jedda and flew him to Shaiba, a British military base outside Basra, Iraq. The British military, it turned out, had deemed the 48-year-old father of six a dangerous terrorist who had plotted weapons smuggling and bomb attacks and said jailing him was “necessary for imperative reasons of security.” Eight months later he has not been charged nor seen a lawyer but he is still interned at Shaiba.
“We want our dad back,” his son Abdullah, 11, told the Guardian Thursday. “If he has done something bad why don’t they tell us?”
It is a question the high court in London will be asked next week when lawyers acting for Jedda seek a writ of habeas corpus to have him returned to Britain.
The Iraqi League, a U.K.-based human rights advocacy group, has dubbed the case “Belmarsh in the desert,” a reference to the controversial long-term detentions at the London jail that embarrassed the government earlier this year.
“This is not about my client’s guilt or innocence. It’s about bringing him back to Britain where he can be questioned in the presence of a lawyer and be either charged or released,” said Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers.
According to his family, Jedda, who is half Arab and half Turkoman, left his hometown of Kirkuk in northern Iraq at age 18 to play and coach basketball in the United Arab Emirates. A decade later he moved to Pakistan and worked at an orphanage in Peshawar before moving to Britain in 1992 and claiming political asylum. He became British in 1998 and with help from his brother Saad, also a naturalized Briton, became a small-time property developer and honey merchant selling boxes of it from his London home.
While visiting relatives in Syria in 2001 he was detained for 11 months but released without charge. The same year he divorced his Syrian-born wife, Ehssan, but kept custody of their four children. He later married another Syrian, Eman, and took a second wife, Asma, 25, a Jordanian.
Authorities at Shaiba declined to speak about the case, but in a letter to Jedda dated May 6 the British army said he was suspected of membership in a terrorist group involved in weapons smuggling and bombings. “Accordingly, on the balance of probabilities, your internment remains necessary for imperative reasons of security,” said the letter, signed by Maj. Gen. J.P. Riley.
A separate letter said the U.N. Security Council, at the Iraqi government’s request, had authorized multinational forces to intern people without trial without necessarily disclosing the reason why. “The justification for internment in each case, including your own, is reviewed very carefully at least once a month and a decision taken by the commanding general which is then communicated to each internee with specific reasons if he or she is to remain in custody,” said the second letter.
Shiner is confident Jedda will be flown home soon. “The government doesn’t have the beginnings of a defense,” he said. Until then Jedda’s family will continue the weekly ritual they performed Thursday. Weary from the previous day’s drive from Baghdad, they queued with relatives of other detainees to enter the base, a sprawling complex of sand, razor wire and watchtowers. Carrying cakes, pita bread and mutton, the family spent an hour inside the base.
“He is not well, not sleeping. He is very stressed. His hands shook when he drank from a glass,” said the Jedda’s sister, Huda Razaq, 48, a retired engineer. “I swear he is innocent. He is more interested in women than politics.”
Jedda’s cell is air conditioned against temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit, but he complained of pain in his left knee, an old basketball injury that has had him on crutches for years. He said he had lost 62 pounds since his arrest.
His four children, Abdullah, Khadija, 13, Himan, 12, and Hesan, 8, have British passports and speak with London accents. They dread the drive from Baghdad, a perilous route during which they have seen corpses and insurgent attacks, but insist on visiting their father. Razaq hosts them in her Baghdad home but worries that their nationality makes them kidnap targets. Threats have been made against the family and a shot was fired at the house.
The children pine for London but refuse to return without their father. “He takes us for walks in Hyde Park. He’s a great dad,” said Himan.
Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, Wednesday night escaped a suicide bomb assassination attempt, hours after officials said dozens had been killed in two separate massacres, raising fears of an escalation in the insurgency. Allawi’s convoy was attacked as he headed to his home in the Iraqi capital after talks on the formation of the new government, details of which are likely to be unveiled Thursday, a government spokesman said.
One policeman was killed and two were injured in the attack, but the prime minister escaped unscathed. Bursts of gunfire were heard after the explosion rocked a police checkpoint in the western neighborhood where Allawi’s home and party headquarters are located.
At least eight other Iraqis were killed in a spate of other suicide bombs that rocked the capital Wednesday.
Farther afield, officials acknowledged two grisly discoveries that yielded at least 70 corpses and, if confirmed, would underline the audacity of an insurgency that seems able to slaughter at will, despite coalition claims that it is losing momentum.
President Jalal Talabani said more than 50 corpses had been dragged from the Tigris River. And at Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, 19 men were found dead in a stadium.
“We have the full names of those who were killed and those criminals who committed these crimes,” Talabani said of the grim discovery in the Tigris. But he did not specify the location or timing while answering questions about a search for hostages allegedly seized last week in Madaen, 14 miles south of Baghdad.
An unnamed police lieutenant colonel told the Agence France-Presse that 57 decomposing bodies of men, women and children were found between al-Wahda and al-Hafriya, about 10 miles downriver from Madaen. He said police had photographed and buried the bodies outside the town of Suwayrah.
The claim deepened the mystery over what happened at Madaen. Shiite politicians said last weekend that Sunni gunmen had taken dozens of civilians and had threatened to kill them if other Shiites did not leave. Some reported relatives missing. But when Iraqi security forces entered Madaen they found no hostages, but plenty of residents saying the story was untrue. Some mainstream Sunni leaders agreed with militants that Shiite politicians had manufactured the drama. If bodies have been found it will inflame tension between the majority Shiites, poised to assume power after decades of oppression, and the Sunnis.
In Haditha, residents heard gunshots from a football stadium and reportedly found the bodies of 19 men by a bloodstained wall. The men wore civilian clothing but were believed to have been soldiers on their way home for a religious holiday.
More than 400 Iraqi police and soldiers have died in the past two months, many ambushed while off-duty.
On Tuesday night a suicide car bomber in southern Baghdad killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded four others. At least 10 Iraqis died in other attacks earlier that day.
The January election was credited for a relative lull in violence, but there is still no new government and the mayhem is back. President Talabani said he hoped the squabbling coalition of Kurds and Shiites that won the election would announce a cabinet Thursday.
Farmers and fishermen are devastating Iraq’s marshes, considered by some to be the site of the Garden of Eden, with uncontrolled use of chemicals and fishing using electric shocks, researchers warned Monday. The illegal methods are wiping out wildlife, polluting water, endangering human health and undermining the recovery of one of the world’s great wetlands, they say.
The marshes are part of what British troops stationed there call Iraq’s “wild, wild east,” a remote, lawless region where impoverished communities have a tradition of defying authority. Since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein two years ago there has been a boom in the use of electroshock — with nets attached to car batteries — to catch fish, says Iraq Nature, an environmental group. Many of the fish not caught are left sterilized or dead, the rotting bodies spawning organic matter that uses up oxygen, which in turn allows bacteria to flourish, upsetting the ecological balance. The damage is made worse by farmers using chemicals intended to treat lice in sheep as pesticides for their crops and by hunters using poison to catch birds.
Iraq’s deputy health minister, Amer al-Khuza’i, Monday urged Iraq’s most revered cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to issue a fatwa against misuse of the chemicals and poison.
Originally twice the size of the Florida Everglades, the 8,000 square miles of marshes were fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and were home to hundreds of species of birds and fish.
The 5,000-year-old marsh Arab culture, based on artificial islands and houses made from tall reeds, is considered a cradle of civilization. The marsh Arabs were accused of helping and harboring rebels and outlaws during the failed Shiite uprising against Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War, prompting a devastating crackdown.
Thousands were killed and a gargantuan dike-building program drained the marshes to just 7 percent of their original extent, a catastrophe compared to the drying up of the Aral Sea in Central Asia and the deforestation of the Amazon.
When coalition troops overthrew the regime, the surviving marsh Arabs broke many of the dikes and water flooded back, restoring much of the wetland. Earlier this year the journal Science reported the return of giant reeds, waterbirds and otters, prompting optimism that recovery was underway. But Iraq Nature researchers who have visited the region each month for the past year said thousands of fishermen were boosting their catch by connecting cheap car batteries with cables to 6-foot poles with nets. The 12-volt shock electrocuted fish within a 5-meter radius, yielding 20 kilograms of fish each day per fisherman.
“They know it is wrong, but they are poor and say it is the only way to feed their families,” said Raied Hameed, one of the researchers. “It is a very serious problem for the marshes.”
The Iraqi police and army seldom venture into the countryside and the British forces know better than to inflame protests by intervening, he added. With few schools, clinics, roads or jobs, the region sees little reason to obey authorities — which historically have been at best neglectful, at worst murderous.
Anna Sophia Bachmann, an advisor to Iraq Nature, said electroshocking probably started in the ’80s during the chaos of war with Iran and resumed with a vengeance with the partial restoration of the marshes two years ago.
In a separate warning, Qais al-Salman, head of the National Institute of Environmental and Water Technology, said the marsh’s farmers and hunters could unleash a “complete disaster” for public health and the environment.
Birds that recently started to return are being poisoned and sold in markets. Veterinary chemicals intended for sheep are being used to dust crops and poison fish, he said.
A late-morning sun baked Jadriya Street and life moved in slow motion, the traffic inching through rush hour, the rubbish collectors pausing for rest, the shoppers dawdling in cafes. A police convoy of Land Cruisers and pickup trucks weaved through the jam clogging the middle-class Shiite district of central Baghdad. No one noticed the minibus, one of the ubiquitous South Korean-made Kias, until it exploded into a fireball. The bang was like a clap of thunder inside your skull, said one survivor, and the heat wave like a giant oven door swinging open.
The bomb incinerated a dozen vehicles and hurled metal shards through cars, windows and flesh. Stunned, the police fired into the air. Guards from the Al-Hamra Hotel raced out and joined the shooting, though at what nobody knew. Then the second bomb, apparently packed into a Volkswagen 200 meters from the first, sent more shrapnel hissing up the street. Bodies burned in cars while the wounded staggered and slumped. Some survivors described a sudden, deep silence, but they had been deafened. Jadriya was filled with shouts and moans and sirens.
The twin blasts killed at least 15 people, including several children, five trash collectors and one policeman, and wounded dozens. A bad day in Baghdad but far from its worst and not enough to dent U.S. optimism that things are getting better.
Earlier this week President Bush told cheering American troops that the establishment of a “free Iraq” would crush tyranny and terror. U.S. and British commanders claim the insurgency is weakening and cite a steep fall in the number of daily attacks and coalition casualties.
Thursday’s atrocity in Jadriya will not alter those calculations, nor will the gunning down of five policemen and a civilian in the northern city of Kirkuk.
Al-Qaida in Iraq, a group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility in an Internet statement: “Two lions from the martyrs’ brigade launched themselves [on] an apostate police patrol.” In other words, one of the most feared and effective insurgent groups had launched a big attack but had managed to kill just one policeman and injure two, a good result for homegrown security forces trained by coalition troops.
It was not so good for the civilians of Jadriya, which lies on the Tigris River. The dead and the body parts went straight to the morgue while ambulances ferried most of the wounded to Yarmuk Hospital. The sirens alerted staff, who were ready for the stream of patients into the emergency ward, some limping, some on stretchers.
A 12-year-old boy called Abbas had lost his father and was in shock. Shrapnel was lodged in his forehead and behind his right ear, his head was bandaged and his face was speckled with blood. Seated on a bed, he watched the other casualties with no apparent interest.
Firas Rahman, a 35-year-old businessman, considered himself lucky. After the first blast he ducked under his dashboard. The second blast destroyed his Audi but, thanks to the airbag, he escaped with a chest and face peppered with gashes. “They are not Muslims, those who did this,” he said. Like many Iraqis, Rahman distinguishes the “bad resistance,” which targets Iraqis, from the “good resistance,” which targets only Americans.
According to police there was a third car bomb that failed to detonate, possibly because the driver was injured in one of the first two blasts. The suspect was also treated at Yarmuk.
There was no panic, barely even a bustle, at the hospital, which had enough staff, medicine and stocks of blood. “I wouldn’t call this an especially busy day,” said one nurse, Raha Hussein.
A policeman watched his wounded colleague being hooked to a drip. “Bitterness fills my mouth,” he said. But he too was phlegmatic about his sixth bomb in nine months on the force. Did he like his job? “Love it. I want to serve Iraq.”
At the bomb site a familiar choreography unfolded. Apache helicopters circled overhead as American Humvees and Iraqi police cars sealed off the road. Military bulldozers moved in to clear away charred vehicles. Onlookers huddled and spoke in low voices before drifting away. By dusk the roadblocks were lifted and traffic returned. A warm wind scattered the soot and ash.
American troops were accused Sunday of violating international law by taking two Iraqi women hostage in a bungled effort to persuade fugitive male relatives to surrender. Soldiers seized a mother and daughter from their home in Baghdad two weeks ago and allegedly left a note on the gate: “Be a man Muhammad Mukhlif and give yourself up and then we will release your sisters. Otherwise they will spend a long time in detention.” It was signed “Bandit 6,” apparently a military code, and gave a mobile-phone number. When phoned by reporters an American soldier answered, but he declined to take questions and hung up.
Salima al-Batawi, 60, and her daughter Aliya, 35, were blindfolded, handcuffed and driven away in a Humvee convoy on April 2, leaving the Arab Sunnis of Taji, a town north of the capital, incandescent. Instead of surrendering, her sons Ahmad, Saddam and Arkan alerted the media. None of them is called Muhammad, but it is believed that the note referred to Ahmad and that the Americans wanted all three brothers.
The brothers have spent time in Abu Ghraib jail, but have not been charged and say they are citrus farmers with no connection to the insurgency.
Lt. Col, Clifford Kent, of the 3rd Infantry Division, said the women had been seized as suspected insurgents in their own right and not as a bargaining chip. “We do not take hostages. Sources told us the women were present during meetings to plan attacks against coalition forces and that they had knowledge of terror cell leaders and the location of weapons caches in the area.” He said there is a separate inquiry into Bandit 6′s note, which was handwritten in Arabic.
After six days in a U.S. jail near Baghdad airport the women were released without charge, but they could be rearrested if a continuing investigation implicated them, Lt. Col. Kent said.
Nicole Choueiry, of Amnesty International, said: “I do not think it is the first time. It is against international law to take civilians and use them as bargaining chips.”
Detaining women has become an explosive issue in Iraq. A statement purportedly from militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said a recent rocket attack by insurgents on Abu Ghraib was partly to avenge the incarceration of women. U.S. officials say there are no longer any female inmates in the jail, made notorious by the abuses revealed last year, including evidence of sexual misconduct against women.
At home Sunday, Batawi said the Americans threatened to hold her until her sons surrendered, but treated her and her daughter with respect. “They carried out a professional investigation. We found beds with clean sheets and copies of the Koran and bottles of water in a big room.” But she felt humiliated by being forced to wear an orange prison uniform without a head scarf and resented being asked whether she was Shiite or Sunni.
A militant group said Sunday that it had kidnapped the deputy of the Pakistani chargé d’affaires in Baghdad, Malik Mohammad Javed. Another group said it had captured and killed Basem Mohammed Kadem, an Iraqi brigadier general.
