Triple car bombing kills 40 in southern Iraq
Reuters
By Aref Mohammed Reuters - Wednesday, December 12
06:00 pm
AMARA, Iraq (Reuters) - Three car bombs ripped through
a busy street in the Shi'ite city of Amara on
Wednesday, killing 40 people and wounding 125 in one
of the deadliest attacks in southern Iraq this year,
police said.
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The coordinated attacks came just days before Britain
is to complete the handover of security for the four
southern provinces it has controlled since 2003.
Tensions have been running high between rival Shi'ite
factions competing for influence in the oil-producing
south although one analyst said al Qaeda was the
likely culprit.
The street in Amara was a scene of chaos, with cars
torn apart. A blocked gutter along one street was red
with blood washed from pools on the pavement next to a
child's shoes.
"I arrived just after the explosions. It was gruesome
and horrible -- pieces of flesh sprayed everywhere,"
said taxi driver Kazim Mutar, 42.
"They were women, children, market traders. The aim of
this explosion was to kill (civilians)."
Amara, capital of Maysan province, has no foreign
troops after Britain handed over responsibility for
security in the province to Iraqi forces in April,
part of a plan to pull British troops off the streets
by the end of this year.
Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the
last stage of that plan would go ahead in four days
despite the blasts, with Iraqi forces taking control
of neighbouring Basra province, source of nearly all
of Iraq's oil export revenue.
"(The bombing) has nothing to do with Basra. The
handover will go ahead on the 16th of this month. The
quality of the forces in Basra is excellent," he said
at a conference in Basra. It was the first official
announcement of the handover date.
One police official in Amara said 40 people had been
killed in the blasts. A health official and the head
of the provincial council security committee said 39
were killed and more than 125 wounded.
"Operating rooms are stretched to the limit because of
the number of wounded. The city is in shock because
it's the first big explosion like this," the police
official said by telephone.
Most people were killed in the second and third
blasts, police said. Onlookers had gathered after the
first blast in a parking lot.
Outside the south, a car bomb in Baghdad killed five
people and wounded 13, police said.
RARE IN SOUTH
Southern Iraq has largely escaped the sectarian
carnage that has plagued other parts of the country.
Car bombings, often blamed on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda
militants, usually happen in and around Baghdad or in
provinces north of the capital.
Oslo-based historian Reidar Visser, an expert on
southern Iraq who edits the Web site historiae.org,
pointed the finger at al Qaeda.
"I would say that, on the surface, the Amara bombings
seem to have the hallmarks of an isolated al-Qaeda
operation rather than being part of an internal
Shi'ite-on-Shi'ite fight for control," Visser told
Reuters.
The south has been the scene of a turf war between
Shi'ite groups, including supporters of cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr and their chief rivals, the Supreme Islamic
Iraqi Council.
Two southern provincial governors and several senior
police commanders have been assassinated in recent
months. Maysan is home to Iraq's isolated Marsh Arabs.
Officials said a curfew had been imposed in Amara, a
city of several hundred thousand people about 365 km
(230 miles) southeast of Baghdad. They said an
undisclosed number of suspects had been detained after
the blasts.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called the bombings a
"desperate attempt" to draw attention away from recent
security gains across Iraq. State television said the
provincial police chief had been sacked.
Three days ago British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
paid a brief visit to British forces at their last
base in Iraq near Basra and said they had succeeded in
improving security in the south. Britain has 4,500
troops left in Iraq, which Brown has ordered cut to
just 2,500 by mid-2008.
(Additional reporting by Mussab al-Khairalla in Basra,
and Peter Graff, Aseel Kami, Dean Yates and Aws Qusay
in Baghdad; Writing by Peter Graff and Dean Yates;
Editing by Robert Woodward)
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