Iraq market bombing follows political breakthrough

The feared resumption of mass sectarian violence erupted in a Baghdad Shiite slum when bombers blew apart two markets, killing at least 44 people and wounding about 200.

The bloody assaults on Sadr City yesterday came only minutes after Iraqi political leaders said the new parliament will convene on Thursday, three days earlier than planned.

The US ambassador has been pushing to break a stalemate over naming a unity government.

The attackers struck with car bombs, including a suicide driver, and mortars at the peak shopping time, destroying dozens of market stalls and vehicles as the explosives ripped through the poor neighbourhood.

Residents had been buying food for their evening meals.

The neighbourhood was quickly sealed off by Mahdi Army militiamen of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr amid pandemonium as residents searched wildly for survivors and put charred corpses into ambulances and trucks.

Smoke billowed into the evening sky and angry young men kicked the decapitated head of the suicide attacker, who appeared to be an African, that lay in the street.

The nature of the attack and its use of a suicide bomber bore the hallmarks of al Qaida in Iraq, which has said it hoped to start a Shiite-Sunni civil conflict.

Police said they defused a third car bomb, probably preventing an even higher death toll.

Bomb blasts, rocket and gunfire also killed at least 12 other pele – 10 in Baghdad – and wounded 34 yesterday.

The Sadr City bombers struck shortly after US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and leaders of Iraq’s main ethnic and religious blocs concluded a news conference to announce agreement to move forward the first session of the new parliament to Thursday.

The political leaders said they would open marathon meetings today in an attempt to reach agreement on a new government. Mr Khalilzad said he would be available to join the talks at any time.

Among the issues to be discussed are how many positions various blocs will get in the new government, which will fill key posts and the government’s programme of action.

The first parliamentary session will take place three months after December 15 elections and a month after the results were certified. It sets in motion a 60-day deadline for the legislature to elect a new president, approve the nomination of a prime minister and sign off on his Cabinet.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, stood by Shiite leader Adbul-Aziz al-Hakim and other Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular leaders to make the announcement.

Mr Khalilzad said a permanent government needed to be in place quickly to fill the “vacuum in authority” at a time of continuing effort by “terrorists to provoke sectarian conflict”.

Prime minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, a Shiite, did not attend the meeting in the US-controlled Green Zone but met earlier with Mr Talabani.

Dr Al-Jaafari’s candidacy for a second term as prime minister is one of the major issues in dispute as some Kurdish, Sunni and secular leaders argue he is too divisive and did too little to contain the sectarian violence that killed hundreds after being unleashed by the February 22 destruction of the famous gold dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra.

Iraqis had feared an attack like the one that hit the Shiite slum yesterday was coming, especially after al-Sadr’s fighters stormed out of the slum to take revenge on Sunni Muslims and their mosques after the Samarra attack.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, the country’s largest Sunni Muslim group, condemned the bombings, which it said were ”carried out by the enemies of our nation who don’t like to see Iraqis united or living in a stable country”.