BAGHDAD, Iraq – At 8 a.m. Sunday, Abdullah Daud was waiting in a long line at a checkpoint outside the U.S. administration headquarters, hoping to be chosen for a day’s construction work inside.
By 10 a.m., Daud lay on an emergency room cot, blood seeping through bandages on his head. Nearby lay an older man who had been standing behind him in line. His face was entirely swathed in gauze, and the doctors had said he probably would not survive.
A white pickup truck loaded with 1,000 pounds of plastic explosives and several 155mm artillery shells exploded at the main public gate to U.S. occupation headquarters Sunday, killing at least 20 bystanders and injuring about 63 people, U.S. military officials said.
The suicide bombing turned a central Baghdad street into an inferno. The bomb detonated in the middle of rush-hour traffic, turned cars into bonfires, sent metal flying two hundred yards and shook buildings two miles away. The explosion took place just outside a large, domed archway into the Republican Palace, one of deposed President Saddam Hussein’s most grandiose residences. Soldiers posted there call it Assassin’s Gate.
Most of the casualties were Iraqis. Two of the dead were foreigners, officials said, but they had not been identified by Sunday night. Some news reports said the wounded included three U.S. civilians and three American soldiers.
Hospital rooms filled with bloodied patients and weeping relatives. Again and again, victims and witnesses expressed rage at the attackers and disbelief that Iraqi bombers could have deliberately targeted their fellow citizens.
Some also voiced frustration and bitterness at the massive U.S. military presence in Iraq, which they said had brought on the calamity and failed to protect them. Many Iraqis pointed out that almost all the wounded and dead were Iraqis, and they said that the attackers’ motive was to punish or intimidate Iraqis for working with the Americans.
“I don’t know what kind of Iraqi could do something like this against other Iraqis, exactly at the time when the checkpoint would be most crowded,” said Daud, 26, his voice shaking with bewildered rage.
Daud speculated that the suicide bombers must have come from somewhere else, “from Palestine, or from Osama” bin Laden, he said with disgust, “who thinks he is the new Islamic prophet.”
Then the wounded man’s anger took another turn. “It’s all the Americans’ fault,” he said. “They should take care of this country. … They should help us as they promised they would.”
At Yarmouk Hospital, Riadh Jamal Haider, 26, lay recovering from a chest wound with tubes crisscrossing his body. He described how he had been waiting at the checkpoint when the bomb exploded and his chest began gushing blood “like water from a faucet,” before he fell and lost consciousness.
Some Iraqis who were wounded, or whose cars were damaged in the blast, expressed bitterness that they had suffered while the Americans, including officials sheltered inside the compound and soldiers guarding it, had emerged mostly unscathed. Iraqi civilian employees, police and passersby bore the brunt of the morning rush-hour devastation.
“This is a sabotage and hatred operation,” said Jasim Muhammed Khalidy, 31, a taxi driver who was being treated in a hospital for cuts from flying glass. His cab had been passing the scene when he said he saw the bombers’ car “fly up in the air and come down. … I saw many wounded people lying on the street,” he said. “All this comes down on our heads.”
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