Suicide bombers shatter anniversary

A thousand-foot-high pall of smoke hung over Baghdad last week, the deadly riposte of car bombers to a call for prayers to mark the anniversary of last year's destruction of the Golden Shrine in Samarra.

A succession of car bombs shattered a city centre market ? killing more than 75 people. Shortly before, the Shia-led Iraqi Government called for a 15-minute silence to commemorate last year's bombing, which ushered in the current wave of retaliatory sectarian slaughter.

The attacks came as Iran denied US accusations that it was supplying sophisticated armour-piercing weapons to Shia militias in Iraq, and on the day that Iraq's High Court sentenced Taha Yassin Ramadan, Saddam Hussein's former Vice-President, to death in the same case for which the dictator was executed. The latest bombing, part of an upsurge of violence since the new year, wounded more than 160 people and shattered 75 cars around the central Shorja district on the eastern bank of the Tigris.

As scores of wounded were rushed to hospital in any available vehicle, the security forces estimated that between two and five car bombers had struck, with another planting a parcel bomb that killed nine people nearby. "Paramedics were picking up body pieces and human flesh from the pools of blood on the ground and placing them in small plastic bags," Wathiq Ibrahim said.

Frustration is mounting about the carnage, which comes as the Government has begun implementing its much-vaunted Baghdad security plan. Amid the shattered stores and market stalls, survivors of yesterday's blasts were screaming: "Where is the Government? Where is the security plan?"

Earlier, Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, had called on mosques to chant "Allahu Akbar" [God is Greatest] and to ring church bells to commemorate the anniversary of Samarra, which fell yesterday in the Muslim calendar.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shia cleric, had issued a statement earlier in the day lamenting the internecine slaughter that has dragged the country toward civil war. "The explosion of the holy shrine pushed the country into blind violence, in which tens of thousands of innocents were killed. No one knows but Allah when this tragedy will be over," he said.

Yesterday's attacks ? almost certainly the work of Sunni insurgents ? came as Ramadan was sentenced to death for the murder of 148 Shia villagers in Dujail in the 1980s after an assassination attempt on Saddam. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but prosecutors appealed, and the death warrant was yesterday upheld by Iraq's High Court. The decision will do nothing to ease sectarian divisions over the fate of Saddam and his senior lieutenants.

The Times-UK