BAGHDAD, Sept 14: A suicide bomber in Baghdad on Wednesday lured a crowd of day labourers to his minivan and blew it up, killing 114 people in the bloodiest of a wave of attacks that took more than 150 lives in the capital.
He drew the men to his vehicle with promises of work before detonating the bomb, which contained up to 220kgs of explosives, in the capital’s Kadhimiya neighbourhood.
Al Qaeda’s frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, declared ‘all-out war’ against Shias, in an audiotape attributed to him and posted on the Internet on Wednesday.
“The Al Qaeda Organization in the Land of Two Rivers is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha (a pejorative term for Shias), wherever they are in Iraq,” according to the tape, whose authenticity could not immediately be verified.
Zarqawi, the one-legged extremist who has a 25 million dollar price on his head, also urged Sunnis to ‘wake up from your slumber ... the war to exterminate Sunnis will never end’.
The Kadhimiya incident was the second deadliest single attack since the US-led invasion of March 2003, and comes after days of fighting between US-Iraqi forces and Sunni guerillas in the remote town of Tal Afar. Some 160 people have died in the fighting.
“There’s no political party here, there are no police,” Mohammed Jabbar railed at the blast site in the Kadhimiya area of Baghdad.
“This targeted civilians, innocents. Why women and children?” he added, as bystanders shouted, “Why? Why?”
Another car bomber blew himself up in northern Baghdad, killing 11 people lined up to refill gas canisters, as bombings rocked the capital.
Gunmen also dragged 17 people from their homes in Taji, a northern Baghdad suburb, and killed them.
The gunmen rounded up their victims in the middle of the night. All were shot in the head, and all were Shia relatives from the same tribe, police said.
A police official said the attacks appeared coordinated. Iraq’s Al Qaeda claimed in a statement it was waging a nationwide suicide bombing campaign to avenge the US-Iraqi offensive on the northern town of Tal Afar.
The statement on a website did not, however, mention a specific attack.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said in Washington: “There are claims of responsibility. They’re really, quite frankly, hard to verify. I wouldn’t be able to tell you that we know who’s responsible at this point.”
VAN EXPLODES: Nayif Atshan, 58, was close to the Kadhimiya blast.
He said a man in a van pulled up to the crowd and asked if anyone wanted work. Some jumped in and others crowded around. Then the man got back in the van and it blew up, Mr Atshan said.
“I still remember the man’s beard,” he said in Karama hospital, part of his leg blown off.
“After the explosion, cars were burning around me and flesh was scattered everywhere. It was raining blood.” —Reuters/AFP
