IRAQ: Car bomb kills 26 as Ramadan begins in Baghdad

A car bomb killed 26 people in a Shi'ite militia stronghold in east Baghdad on Saturday (September 23) hours after Sunni Muslims began the fasting month of Ramadan, which U.S. commanders warn may see a rise in sectarian bloodshed. State television, quoting the Defence Ministry command, flashed the arrest of a man it said was the leader of one of the most militant Sunni groups, Ansar al-Sunna, which has been allied with al Qaeda. However, spokesmen for the ministry and the U.S. military could not confirm the arrest. Police said the car bomb blast near a fuel station in Sadr City, one of the deadliest in recent weeks, also wounded at least 29 people. It was not immediately clear whether the vehicle was parked or driven by a suicide attacker, they said. But one eyewitness said it was a suicide bomber. "There was an explosion targeting the poor civilians." (Was it a suicide bomber?) "Yes, it was a suicide bomber. What did those people do? The poor civilians were trying to get kerosene and gasoline. All of them were women and children. There were no men," one unidentified eyewitness told Reuters Television. U.S. and Iraqi troops have mounted a major security crackdown since last month in an effort to clamp down on violence that they warn risks destroying the four-month-old national unity government through all-out sectarian civil war. Sadr City, slum stronghold of the movement of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, had been spared much of the violence until recent months when Sunni accusations have grown that his Mehdi Army militia is among those behind thousands of "death squad" killings. Many Sunnis, a majority in the Arab world but a disaffected minority in Iraq, began to observe the Ramadan fast on Saturday, a timing dependent on sightings of the moon. Clerics from Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority have yet to announce the start of the month but are likely to do so in the next day or two. A source in the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, said it expected to announce late on Sunday that Ramadan would start on Monday (September 25). U.S. commanders have said that, as in the past three years, they anticipate an increase in violence during Ramadan, when Muslims fast during daylight and spend more time in prayer.

ITN Source | September 23, 2006

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