Ten die in market attack on Shi’ites

SUNNI-LED insurgents killed at least 10 people with a car bomb in a crowded vegetable market yesterday as Iraqi security forces said they had captured a woman wearing explosives hidden under her clothes.

The discovery came two days after the first known blast by a female suicide attacker in Iraq, which raised fears of a new insurgent strategy.

An Iraqi general said the woman was heading for a crowded weekly secondhand goods market in Baghdad when she was detained.

In continuing attacks on Shi’ites, the death toll rose to 102 from the previous day’s attacks in another Shi’ite town.

Elsewhere, in the southern city of Basra, a police convoy was ambushed late Thursday, killing four policemen and wounding one, said Captain Mushtaq Khazim.

Sunni militants have launched a bloody new surge of violence to wreck an October 15 referendum on a new constitution - targeting the Shi’ite majority which now dominates Iraq’s government.

At least 198 people, including 13 US service members, have been killed in the past five days.

Al-Qaida in Iraq, the country’s most feared insurgent group, has declared “all-out war” on Shi’ites. But the style of Thursday and yesterday’s attacks indicated some other group may have carried them out.

Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for either, and both explosions included parked car bombs. Al-Qaida traditionally relies on suicide bombers and quickly claims its operations. Moderate Sunni Arab leaders have urged their community to reject the constitution, saying it will fragment Iraq and leave them weak, compared with Shi’ites and Kurds. Passage of the charter is key to prospects for starting a withdrawal of American troops - and if it fails, the country’s political instability will deepen.

The bombing attacks in the two mainly Shi’ite towns, Hillah and Balad, appeared aimed at killing as many civilians as possible.

Yesterday morning’s car bomb exploded in the Souq al-Sharia, an outdoor vegetable market bustling with shoppers, about 180 metres from the provincial governor’s office in Hillah, 97 kilometres south of Baghdad. At least 10 people, including three women and two children, were killed and 41 were wounded, said Dr Mohammed Beirum of Hillah General Hospital.

The Balad attack came Thursday just before sunset, 80km north of the capital. A suicide bomber drove his car into the town’s outdoor produce market, detonating it, followed moments later by an explosion of a car parked at a nearby bank. Another parked car exploded on Bint al-Hassan Street, a busy commercial avenue, said police chief Col Kazem Abdul-Razaaq.

At least 102 people were killed, including 13 children and four women, and 150 were wounded, said Dr Khaled al-Azzawi of Balad hospital. An unspecified number of Sunnis who run some of the stands in the market were among the victims.

Also Thursday, the US military announced the deaths of five US soldiers a day earlier in a roadside bombing during combat in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, a hotbed of Iraq’s insurgency.