Suicide car bomber kills 115, wounds 146 outside Iraq clinic
BAGHDAD -- Early yesterday morning, Younis Qasim sent his 10-year-old son to buy vegetables at the market in central Hillah, a city south of the capital. Later, at home with his family, Qasim heard an explosion, immediately thought of his son, and ran out to find him.
At the same moment, Khalid Alwan was sitting in his apartment near a medical clinic. He realized what had happened just as the windows of his apartment shattered in a spray of glass.
A car bomb targeting Iraqi civilians applying for government jobs had exploded outside the clinic, killing at least 115 people and wounding at least 146. It was one of the deadliest attacks of the insurgency.
''We were shocked," said Alwan, 31, as he stepped around pools of blood and pieces of flesh. ''I don't know what these cowards get from killing all those people."
The bomb blew up at 9:30 a.m. as people were lining up at the Popular Clinic of Hillah for medical tests required for positions in the health and education ministries and the security forces, said Qais Hamza, police chief of Babil province, which includes Hillah, a bustling city of nearly half a million people 60 miles south of Baghdad.
Fire and metal shards from the blast ripped through the crowd of job applicants as well as the nearby vegetable and fruit market, which was filled with women and children shopping for their daily produce.
Qasim, 34, had raced to the market to look for his son. But hours after the blast, he still had not located him. ''I am afraid," Qasim said. ''This place should have been well protected. How could the police or army not recognize that? Don't they know this country is full of terrorism?"
Witnesses said the blast came from a white
''It was terrible," said Aqeel Muslim, 40, who operates a small tea stand near the clinic. ''People were screaming and running, covered with blood. Some of the shrapnel and pieces of flesh fell near my stand."
The clinic and nearby buildings were pocked with holes from the blast; blood collected on the sidewalks and in the street. After the dead and wounded were carried away, men collected the stray shoes, scraps of clothes, and bags of the victims and tossed them in a pile. And in an all-too-familiar scene after a bomb attack in Iraq, volunteers grimly picked up remains and placed them on blankets.
Muhammed Dhia, the director of Hillah Hospital, said 146 people were injured in the attack. Dozens of people are unaccounted for and the number of dead is likely to climb, he said.
The wounded included not only applicants for government jobs, but also residents of Hillah and the surrounding area who had been seeking general medical care, police officials said.
Insurgents have been trying to disrupt the formation of a new government by majority Shi'ites. They routinely target Iraqi security forces and government officials, believing them to be pawns of the US government.
A second car bomb exploded yesterday at a police checkpoint in Musayyib, about 20 miles north of Hillah, killing at least one police officer and wounding nine, according to police and hospital officials in Baghdad where the casualties were taken.
Hillah, built in the 11th century from the bricks of the ruins of ancient Babylon, is a predominantly Shi'ite Muslim city. The area is agricultural, and Hillah's surrounding farms produce dates and fruits for shipment to other parts of the country. The city's qaimer, a traditional buttermilk spread, is famous in Iraq.
The attack in Hillah was the second major bombing in that city this year.
A suicide car bombing on Jan. 5 that targeted an Iraqi police academy killed at least 15.
There were no immediate assertions of responsibility for the attacks yesterday.
Hours after the bombing in Hillah, Iraq's interim interior minister, Falah Naqib, said at a news conference inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone that his government was working to stop such tragic events.
''First of all," Naqib said, authorities need ''intelligence and cooperation of the people," adding that the government is ''building our intelligence base."
It also is organizing ''strong forces" to battle the insurgents and control the country's borders, he said.
''Once those three elements are complete," Naqib said, ''I think we'll be able to control all these terrorist organizations. . . . I think by the end of summer this year the situation will be . . . different."
Naqib said Iraqi police were learning to spot car bombers more quickly and in several recent cases ''the suicide bomber was killed before the bomb went off."
Lieutenant Mohammed Hadi of the Babil police blamed ''traitors" for the attack.
Hamza, the police chief, said he suspected insurgents connected to the terrorist network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is responsible for some of the worst incidents of violence in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.
The attack in Hillah occurred two days before the one-year anniversary of coordinated bomb blasts in Baghdad and nearby Karbala on March 2, 2004, that killed about 180 people. More than 100 people also were killed in nearly simultaneous suicide bomb attacks on Feb. 1, 2004, at local offices of the two main Kurdish political parties in northern Iraq.
The insurgency has been relentless, and political leaders in the process of forming a transitional government acknowledge that their success or failure hangs on their ability to stop the violence.
''The police are getting better day after day," said Colonel Adnan Abdul Rahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman. ''But today, maybe there was a mistake by the guards or the policemen who were guarding there, and we are trying to prevent this from happening again."
