Suicide bombers, roadside bombs and gunmen kill more than 120 in Iraq

Explosions ripped through Baghdad every few minutes today, beginning with a huge suicide car bombing that shattered the morning calm in a heavily Shiite northern Baghdad district, targeting labourers gathered to find work for the day.

At least 88 people were killed and 227 wounded in that attack alone.

In all, the attacks in or near the capital – including the shooting of 17 men in a village north of Baghdad – killed more than 120 people and the death toll was rising rapidly.

Al Qaida in Iraq said it was behind the attacks.

A senior American military official said he believed the rash of bombings was retaliation for the joint Iraqi-US sweep through the northern city of Tal Afar in recent days to evict insurgents from their stronghold near the Syrian border.

The bomb that hit as labourers gathered in Kazimiyah was the single deadliest in the country since February 28, when a suicide car bomber targeted Shiite police and National Guard recruits, killing 125 people in Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad.

At Baghdad’s Kazimiyah Hospital, dozens of wounded men lay on stretchers and gurneys, their bandages and clothes soaked in blood. One older man in a traditional Arab gown and chequered head scarf sat in a plastic chair, his blood-soaked underwear exposed with a trail of dried blood snaking down his legs.

Dr Qays Abdel-Wahab al-Bustani said the hospital had received 75 wounded people and 47 others who were killed in the explosion. Al-Bustani said the wounded were in stable condition.

As violence again shattered the capital after a period of relative calm, Iraqi politicians agreed on last-minute revisions to the contested draft constitution in a bid to appease the disgruntled Sunni minority, the core of the country’s virulent insurgency.

In Kazimiyah’s Oruba Square, twisted hulks of vehicles blocked the main street after the suicide attacker drove a small van into the midst of the assembling labourers, looking a days pay doing construction work or odd jobs.

Politicians denounced the attack, with Husein al-Shahristani, deputy speaker of the National Assembly, calling it “barbaric and gruesome.”

Gunmen wearing military uniforms, meanwhile, surrounded a Sunni village 10 miles north of Baghdad in the pre-dawn darkness and shot 17 men, police said.

Taji police Lt Waleed al-Hayali said the gunmen had detained the victims after searching the village. They were handcuffed, blindfolded and shot. The dead included one policeman and others who worked as drivers and construction workers for the US military, said al-Hayali.

The violence, however, was concentrated in and around the capital, where days earlier Iraq’s most feared terrorist group vowed to avenge a US and Iraqi offensive on militant strongholds in the north.

Al Qaida in Iraq today claimed responsibility for many of the attacks.

US forces were the targets of at least three of the attacks. In the most serious, an American military convoy was targeted by a car bomb in eastern Baghdad, wounding two US soldiers, the military said in a statement.

Hours later, in the northern district of Azimiyah, gunmen opened fire on a police car, killing two top police officials and two officers. Three Iraqi soldiers and four policemen died when a suicide car bomber struck as rescuers arrived to help, said police Capt. Nabil Abdul Kadir.

Another car bomb exploded alongside an Iraqi National Guard convoy in the northern Baghdad district of Shula, killing at least two people, authorities said.

In central Baghdad, just a few hundred metres outside the northern border of the heavily fortified Green Zone, a suicide car bomber attacked a US convoy, police said.

An exchange of heavy machine gun fire rattled for about 10 minutes after that blast which injured 14 Iraqi police officers sent columns of black smoke billowing over the city. It was not clear if there were an US casualties.

The deadly car bombing in the Kazimiyah district was the second tragedy there this month. On September 1 about 950 people were killed during a bridge stampede as tens of thousands of Shiite pilgrims headed to a nearby shrines.

With the October 15 referendum on the draft constitution just a month away, Iraqi lawmakers announced that the document had been finalised and would be sent to the United Nations for printing and distribution.

Al-Shahristani, a leading Shiite lawmaker, said the latest changes included an apparent bow to demands from the Arab League that the country be described as a founding member of the 22-member pan-Arab body and that it was “committed to its charter.”

But that amended clause falls short of demands by Sunnis, who wanted the country’s Arab identity clearly spelled out while mentions of federalism be struck from the document. They argue such language could ultimately lead to the disintegration of the multiethnic nation.

Still, the changes, which included clarifying that water resource management was the federal government’s responsibility and that the prime minister would have two deputies in the Cabinet, are significant after weeks of discussions on the draft.

The attacks came as US and Iraqi forces continued their offensive on insurgents in Tal Afar and along the Euphrates River valley to the south, striking hard at what officials have said were militants sneaking across the border from Syria.

Yesterday, two Iraqi troops were seriously wounded in an explosion as they entered a house in Tal Afar that had been previously cleared of threats, authorities said. Also, fierce fighting broke out between suspected militants and Iraqi forces in the Tal Afar district of Kadisiyah..

That operation was a continuation of an almost two-week old offensive in the insurgent-plagued city. Iraqi and US forces have said they killed about 200 militants over the past few days and hundreds more were captured. But troops also found large swaths of the city abandoned by militants who fled in underground tunnels.

Iraq’s defence minister earlier this week pledged to clear the towns along the Iraqi border with Syria, from where officials say the militants sneak in unfettered.