Iraq car bomb kills at least 27

A suicide car bomber sped to American soldiers as they distributed sweets to children and detonated his vehicle today, killing up to 27 other people, US and Iraqi officials said.

One US soldier and about a dozen children were among the dead.

At least 21 others, including three US soldiers, were injured in the attack, the second major suicide bombing in Baghdad this week. Twenty-five people were killed on Sunday when a suicide attacker struck at an army recruiting centre.

The fireball from today’s blast also set a nearby house on fire, the US military said. The attack stunned the impoverished east Baghdad neighbourhood of mostly Shiite Muslims and Christians.

An elderly woman dressed in traditional black beat her chest in front of her house in grief.

“There were some American troops blocking the highway when a US Humvee came near a gathering of children, and US soldiers began to hand them sweets,” said Karim Shukir, 42. “Then suddenly, a speeding car bomb showed up and struck both the Humvee and the children.”

The vehicle used in the attack was a brown Toyota Land Cruiser with a registration plate from the southern city of Basra, police said.

Hospitals and police said between 11 and 13 children were killed. Authorities scrambled to compile an accurate count of the dead and injured.

“The explosion was mainly on the children,” resident Abbas Ali Jassim said.

In a separate attack today, a roadside bomb exploded near an American patrol in eastern Baghdad, killing a seven-year-old child and seriously wounding a woman, police said.

Last September, 35 Iraqi children were killed in a string of bombs that exploded as American troops were handing out sweets at a government-sponsored celebration to inaugurate a sewage plant in west Baghdad.

It was the largest death toll of children in any insurgent attack since the start of the Iraq conflict.

However, many of the families of children killed in the September attack blamed the Americans for the tragedy because their presence attracted insurgents to the ceremony.

Following today’s attack, charred remains of an engine block wrapped in barbed wire lay in the street. A child’s bicycle was crumpled beside the street, which was splattered with pools of blood.

At Kindi hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, one distraught woman swathed in black sat cross-legged outside the operating room. “May God curse the mujahedeen and their leader,” she cried as she pounded her own head in grief.

Hours after the attack, about 200 people turned out for the funeral of five of the victims, in keeping with Muslim tradition that the dead must be buried quickly. The crowd shouted “Allahu Akbar” – “God is great – and some fired weapons in the air.

A US-Iraqi military operation launched in May has significantly reduced suicide bombings in the capital. But US and Iraqi authorities acknowledge that it is difficult to eliminate such attacks entirely.

In other violence today, gunmen killed an Iraqi soldier while he was driving his car in western Baghdad, police said.

Two other Iraqi soldiers, including one lieutenant, were killed in a gun fight in another west Baghdad neighbourhood.