Toll rises in Baghdad market blasts
Relatives collect the victims for burial after bombings at two crowded bazaars.
‘Mentally impaired’
Major-General Qasim Ata, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, said that “both women were mentally impaired. They were wearing belts containing 15kg of explosives.”
“Terrorists are aiming to prevent normal life from coming back to Baghdad, and turn it back to the pre-surge period” Nuri al-Maliki, Iraqi prime minister |
An official at Baghdad’s al-Kindi hospital said in the wake of the blasts: “We have a disaster here. There are too many bodies to count. Many of them are just pieces of flesh.”
On Saturday, dozens of covered bodies lay in an alley outside a nearby hospital mortuary as relatives gathered to take them to cemeteries.
Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said in a statement: “Terrorists are aiming to prevent normal life from coming back to Baghdad, and turn it back to the pre-surge period.”
A bomb attack in November at al-Ghazl killed at least 13 people, with the US military blaming it on Iranian-backed Shia fighters.
Hoda Abdel Hamid, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Baghdad, said that the US and the Iraqi government were facing one of their sternest tests yet.
Al-Ghazl market has been the target of several bomb attacks in recent months [AFP] |
Abdel Hamid said that an increasing poroprtion of suicide bomb attackers were women, especially in Baghdad and in the province of Diyala, which lies northeast of the capital.
Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, said the bombings showed that al-Qaida had “found a different, deadly way” to destabilise Iraq.