BAQOUBA, Iraq – A suicide car bomb that tore through a downtown street Wednesday killed 68 Iraqis and turned a bustling area of shops and fruit stalls into a scene of charred corpses, twisted metal and burning cars – the deadliest attack in the month since U.S. authorities handed sovereignty to an interim government.
The late morning explosion wounded 56 Iraqis, overwhelming the hospital in Baqouba, a city 35 miles northeast of the capital. Every bed was filled, forcing many victims to sit on the floor amid pools of blood as frantic health workers treated them. One wounded man sitting against the wall held his head in his hands and wept. People ran through the corridors searching for information on missing relatives.
“These were all innocent Iraqis, there were no Americans. What was their guilt?” one man shouted at the bomb site, pounding his head in grief. Other men screamed epithets and denounced the attackers as terrorists.
The blast, one of the deadliest single-bomb attacks since Saddam Hussein’s fall more than a year ago, came just three days before the country is to convene a national conference that will choose an interim assembly – considered a crucial step toward establishing democracy.
The explosion capped a violent day across Iraq, with U.S. and other coalition forces fighting a series of gunbattles with insurgents.
In one clash with militants thought to have crossed over from Iran, 35 insurgents and seven Iraqi police were killed near the south-central Iraqi city of Suwariyah. Polish Lt. Col. Artur Domanski, a multinational force spokesman, said he had no information on whether the insurgents were foreign fighters or Iraqi militants. Iran says it does not allow fighters to cross its borders but it does not rule out that such people may cross illegally.
Also Wednesday, the military said clashes throughout Anbar province killed two coalition troops, and two U.S. soldiers were killed in separate roadside bombing attacks. Their deaths raised the toll of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq to at least 906 since the war began, according to an Associated Press tally.
Al-Jazeera television reported that an Iraqi militant group holding two Pakistani contractors had killed the men. The group, calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq, said it kidnapped the Pakistanis because they were working for U.S. forces.
The large number of civilian casualties in attacks has angered many and even raised questions on Islamic Web sites, where the morality of killing Muslims who work for U.S. coalition forces in Iraq has been debated.
In an audio recording posted Wednesday on one site, a speaker purported to be the spiritual adviser of an Iraqi insurgency group justified killing fellow Muslims when they protect infidels and also the deaths of bystanders in an attack.
“If infidels take Muslims as protectors and Muslims do not fight them, it is allowed to kill the Muslims,” said the speaker, identified as Sheik Abu Anas al-Shami, spiritual leader of Tawhid and Jihad, a group led by al-Qaida-linked Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The speaker also said that if Muslims who “mingled” among infidels were killed in an attack, that would be justified because killing infidels is paramount. The tape was recorded before the June 28 handover of power.
Iraqi officials have warned that attacks would get worse as the country works to rebuild and edges toward democracy. U.S. forces have been trying to lower their profile and put Iraqi security forces in the front lines as the new government takes a more prominent role.
Meanwhile, in talks with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah proposed the creation of an Islamic force to help stabilize Iraq and potentially quicken the withdrawal of the U.S.-led military coalition, according to senior Arab and U.S. diplomats in Saudi Arabia.
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