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Baghdad: 64 dead in 30 minutes
01/09/2006 14:12 - (SA)
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| An Iraqi woman carries her son, injured in a bomb blast inside a residential building, after a barrage of co-ordinated bomb and rocket in eastern Baghdad. (Khalid Mohammed, AP) |
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Baghdad - Rescue crews pulled bodies from the rubble of bombed buildings on Friday, after a barrage of co-ordinated attacks across eastern Baghdad killed at least 64 people and wounded 286 in half an hour.
The violence on Thursday evening included explosives planted in blocks of flats, car bombs and several rocket and mortar attacks on mainly Shi'ite neighborhoods and came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Iraqi forces should have control over most of the country by year's end.
The attacks brought Thursday's death toll across the country to 85.
The bombers had rented flats and shops in buildings a few days ago and planted explosives in them, detonating them by remote control on Thursday evening, said major general Jihad Liaabi, director of the interior ministry's counter-terrorism unit.
The attacks occurred between 18:00 and 18:30. A car bomb exploded in a market, another exploded behind a telephone exchange building.
'One of the children died'
Residents picked through the rubble of their homes on Friday morning, carrying their belongings out in blankets.
Kindi hospital, one of four where the wounded and dead were taken, received dozens of casualties.
A young boy, his head and right leg heavily bandaged, his pillow bloodstained, pleaded for a glass of water.
A resident of al-Ameen district, Haidar Nassier, said an explosion had ripped through a clothes store in his neighbourhood of al-Ameen.
"My neighbour, four of his children were injured, and one of them died," he told AP television outside the hospital.
A suicide car bomber killed two people at a petrol station earlier on Thursday.
A British Embassy convoy was targeted in the upscale Mansour neighbourhood in western Baghdad. Two passers-by were wounded in the convoy attack.
The United States military said two American soldiers and a marine were killed on Wednesday. An Associated Press count has the number of US soldiers killed since Sunday at 18.
But authorities said they were optimistic about the handover of security control.
Bush insists troops must remain
Al-Maliki said Iraqi forces would assume responsibility for Dhi Qar province in the south in September, making it the second of Iraq's 18 provinces that local forces would control.
The defence ministry said it would sign a memorandum with coalition forces "about strategic control and operations." on Saturday.
Handing over territory from coalition control to Iraqi control is a key part of the eventual drawdown of US troops in the country.
The top US commander in Iraq, general George Casey, said Iraqi troops were on course to take over security control from US-led coalition forces over the next 12 to 18 months, with little coalition help.
In a speech in the American state of Utah on Friday, US President George W Bush insisted American troops must remain in Iraq until the country's forces were capable of full control.
- AP
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