BAGHDAD, Nov 23: Six car bombs killed 157 people in a Shia stronghold on Thursday in the bloodiest attack in Baghdad since the US invasion and the authorities imposed an indefinite curfew on a city fearful of a sectarian civil war.

A further 275 people were wounded in the series of blasts in the capital’s Sadr City slum, a health ministry official said.

The blasts came at the same time as gunmen surrounded and fired on the health ministry in one of the boldest daylight assaults by militants in Baghdad. After dark, there was sporadic gunfire in several districts.

In Sadr city, parked vehicles packed with explosives caused carnage in streets and a market, a police general told state television. Mortars also landed nearby and residents seized a seventh car they said was driven by a would-be suicide bomber.

“I was out shopping. As the bombs went off, everyone started running and shouting,” news photographer Kareem al-Rubaie said.

“I saw a car from a wedding party, covered in ribbons and flowers. It was burning. There were pools of blood on the street and children dead on the ground.”

Heavily guarded and policed by the Mehdi Army militia of radical Shia leader Moqtada al Sadr, Sadr City was until in this year relatively unscathed. A string of bombings against civilians there in recent months have been seen as a declaration of war on the militia, which Sunnis blame for a wave of death squad violence.

Five people were wounded at the health ministry, about five kilometres from Sadr City, an interior ministry source said, when guerillas fired mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns into the compound.—Reuters