Double car bombings and a homemade bomb tore apart Baghdad
marketplaces on Monday, killing at least 71 people on Monday, a
well-informed police source said.
In the deadliest attack, twin devices ripped through the Shorja
wholesale market, killing over 60 people and wounding 150, police
said. Interior Ministry sources said the coordinated blasts came
from a car bomb and a roadside bomb.
Huge clouds of black smoke and flames belched from a
multi-storey building used by wholesale clothing merchants, turning
the sky black above the debris-strewn street.
The blasts, which rang across Baghdad, turned market stalls to
mangled wrecks among which wooden carts carried badly wounded
survivors with bandaged legs, arms and heads.
"I saw three bodies shredded apart and people wounded being
transported by ambulances," said witness Wathiq Ibrahim.
"Paramedics were picking up body pieces and human flesh from the
pools of blood on the ground and placing them in small plastic
bags."
One old woman railed against the government of Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki, who has accepted a US-backed security plan in
Baghdad, viewed as a last-ditch effort to prevent all-out civil war
between majority Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs.
"They've killed all our sons. What have they left for us?" she
shouted.
A separate roadside bomb attack at the Bab al-Sharji market,
also in central Baghdad and home to both Sunni and Shi'ite Arab
traders, killed at least five people, police sources said.
The attacks occurred a as Shi'ite government officials,
including Maliki, marked several minutes of silence to commemorate
the first anniversary under the Islamic calendar of the bombing of
the al-Askari shrine in Samarra. Under the Gregorian calendar the
bombing was on February 22.
Earlier, Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani urged his followers not to seek revenge against
Sunnis.
He referred to the Samarra bombing, blamed on Sunni militants,
as having plunged Iraq into a cycle of "blind violence".
The latest wave of sectarian violence have caused tens of
thousands of Iraqi casualties since the destruction of the
al-Askari mosque, one of the holiest in Shi'ite Islam. The
widespread bloodshed has further caused hundreds of thousands to be
displaced.
"We call on the believers as they mark this sad occasion and
express their feelings ... to exercise maximum levels of restraint
and not to do or say anything which would harm our Sunni brothers
who are innocent for what happened and who do not accept it,"
Sistani said in a statement.
The reclusive Sistani, who resides in the holy city of Najaf and
leads the Marjaiya (Shi'ite religious establishment), is regarded
as a voice of moderation.
In another development, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter
Steinmeier confirmed Monday that two German citizens were missing
in Iraq since last week and may have been abducted.
"It is true, since Tuesday last week two German nationals have
been missing in the country," he told reporters as he arrived for
talks in Brussels with his EU counterparts. "It cannot be ruled out
that we are talking about a forced kidnapping here."
Steinmeier said that a German governmental crisis group had
convened on February 6 to discuss possible measures.
"We're doing all that we can to ensure that the two hostages
return to their families healthy and well," he added.
A report in Monday's edition of the Berliner
Morgenpost newspaper said that the two were abducted
several days ago in Baghdad. So far, no details have emerged about
the missing pair.
(China Daily via agencies February 13, 2007)
