IRAQ: Mortar attacks and car bombings across Baghdad kill 30.

Gunmen and bombers killed 30 people in Baghdad on Tuesday (December 5), including 14 Shi'ite religious workers after a powerful Iraqi Shi'ite leader urged President George Bush to strike harder at Sunni rebels to avert civil war. Meanwhile, officials in the holy city of Kerbala, south of Baghdad, prepared to bury the bodies of 67 unidentified victims of violence. The Health Ministry said the dead were all shot or showed signs of torture. "We have received the bodies of sixty seven unidentified people from Khadimiyah, from the Forensic Medicine Institute. We brought them to Kerbala for a proper burial, so they get a proper funeral," said a man helping to unload the corpses. Many of those killed in Iraq are kidnapped, tortured, shot or put to death in other ways intended to terrify the wider population. Officials say they have seen many bodies and heads mutilated by power drills. Some groups seek to extract ransom from families and then may either free or kill their captives. Others seem bent mainly on driving out Sunni or Shi'ite Muslims from neighbourhoods where they are in the minority, steadily dividing the city along sectarian lines in a form of ethnic cleansing. In Baghdad, gunmen killed the 14 employees of a Shi'ite religious foundation, while officials said three car bombs killed 16 people and wounded 25 in a separate attack near a fuel station in a religiously mixed area in southern Baghdad. "A car bomb went off here as people were queuing to buy gasoline, killing women and children and minutes later a second car exploded and people started to collect bodies," said Abu Adnan, an eyewitness. The attack in the Bayaa area was the latest of a number of multiple car bomb attacks in the Iraqi capital, including the bloodiest bombing since the U.S. invasion, which killed more than 200 people two weeks ago. The civilian employees for the Shi'ite Endowment, a foundation that oversees religious sites and mosques, were killed when their bus was ambushed, Salah Abdul Razzaq, a spokesman for the organisation, told Reuters. The attacks came a day after Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a cleric and head of the biggest party in Iraq's government, SCIRI, met Bush in Washington as Iraqi and U.S. officials struggle to contain violence pitching the country toward all-out civil war. Iraq is gripped by tit-for-tat sectarian killings between Shi'ites and Sunnis, and many Iraqis fear their oil-rich nation passed the point of no return into sectarian division after the destruction of a Shi'ite shrine in February. Markets were the target of mortar and car bomb attacks in other incidents on Tuesday. Two died and 10 were injured in a mortar attack on a popular market in Qahira district in northern Baghdad and another two died and five were injured when mortars fell on a market in northern baghdad. A car bomb exploded in an Amil district market, killing two and wounding nine. Stalls caught alight and were eventually extinguised by fire crews. In a clear sign of American alarm at escalating violence, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad and the commander of U.S. forces implored Iraqis to break a cycle of violence which they said would destroy the country. Last month, more than 200 Shi'ites were killed in the worst bombing since the U.S. invasion. In Amil one eyewitness to the car bombing said: "A man and his wife left their car here and walked away, later the car exploded in this local market, next to innocent vendors. It is a local market that belongs to the Municipal council. It is only a local market of the municipal council. Why? What did those people do? What did they do wrong?" His bafflement was shared by a woman whose home was damaged by a mortar shell which landed near a school in the Seleikh area. "There was an attack near a mosque two days ago and today an attack near a school. Why? It is a place for children and people only. The insurgents kidnapped people and attacked everything? Why? Why did these attacks happen? We are Muslims."

ITN Source | December 6, 2006

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