At Least 22 Dead in Other Attacks; Leaders Agree to Expedite Unity Talks
By John Ward Anderson and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 13, 2006
BAGHDAD, March 12 -- A series of powerful explosions ripped through a Shiite Muslim slum in Baghdad on Sunday evening, killing about 50 people and wounding more than 200, as top Iraqi politicians vowed to redouble efforts to form a national unity government and ease a recent surge in sectarian violence.
Official casualty tolls from three car bombings in eastern Baghdad's Sadr City were not available. Capt. Salman al-Nuaimi of the Interior Ministry said that 52 people were killed and 208 wounded in the attacks. He said police found a fourth car that was wired with explosives and defused it.
The Associated Press reported 41 dead and more than 140 injured. Many of the wounded suffered life-threatening injuries, officials said.
Hazim al-Araji, a spokesman for the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose followers maintain a large presence in Sadr City, said on al-Jazeera satellite television that 50 people had been killed and more than 295 injured in the explosions. He also said the blasts appeared to have been coordinated.
The series of attacks was the deadliest since the Feb. 22 bombing of the Shiites' revered Askariya mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad, unleashed days of sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunni Arabs that left at least 1,000 people dead. Sunni leaders have said many of the deaths resulted from retaliatory attacks on Sunnis by Sadr's Mahdi Army, a well-armed militia that the U.S. military estimates has about 10,000 members.
Sadr's spokesman specifically attributed the violence Sunday to Sunni extremists and the U.S. military's three-year occupation of Iraq, not Sunni Arabs in general.
"We accuse Zarqawi, the occupation and the Baathist Saddamists," Araji said. He was referring to al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and to die-hard members of deposed president Saddam Hussein's Baath political party. "They have a big role in killing the Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq."
Other attacks Sunday in and around Baghdad left at least 22 people dead and 32 wounded, according to police and other security officials.
Iraqi political leaders, meanwhile, agreed to expedite negotiations on forming a new national unity government that would include all the main political parties. Negotiations stalled in the sectarian violence that erupted after the Samarra mosque bombing and then deadlocked when Kurds and Sunnis demanded that the Shiites withdraw their nominee for prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jafari, saying he had not done enough to improve security or advance reconstruction during his year as transitional prime minister.
Jafari, who was nominated with Sadr's strong backing, has refused to withdraw, saying he was legitimately nominated by the United Iraqi Alliance, a 130-member Shiite coalition that has the largest bloc in Iraq's 275-member parliament.
President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, an influential Shiite leader, said top leaders from every faction had agreed to begin daily negotiations over all aspects of a future national unity government, including its leaders, cabinet posts, programs and policies.
In a sign of urgency, and to avoid conflicts with a Shiite holiday, the parties agreed to move up the opening day of parliament by three days, to this Thursday. It was previously scheduled for Sunday.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has urged the parties to form a coalition government quickly to help stanch sectarian bloodshed.
"The situation is such that there is a degree of vacuum in authority in the current caretaker government," Khalilzad said after attending the meeting, which preceded the blasts in Sadr City. "There is continuous effort by the terrorists to promote sectarian conflict, and therefore in order to deal with the threat, there is a need on an urgent basis to form a government of national unity."
The political development came as Iraq's defense and interior ministers announced that their agencies would begin conducting security raids jointly to raise public confidence that the Shiite-led Interior Ministry was not harboring death squads that target Sunni Arabs and their mosques, as Sunni leaders have alleged.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a Shiite, and Defense Minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi, a Sunni, also unveiled a new policy requiring all suspects arrested by security forces to be presented in court within three days.
The interior minister also announced preliminary results from an investigation of the Samarra mosque bombing last month. He said 20 men had entered the shrine at 8 p.m. and worked until 5:40 a.m. the next morning, strategically placing about 475 pounds of explosives throughout the mosque.
The official also said the bombers set off the explosives by remote control.
The trial of Hussein and his seven co-defendants resumed Sunday, with three of the lesser defendants taking the stand officially for the first time. Hussein and the other defendants are being tried in the killing of 148 people from the town of Dujail, about 35 miles north of Baghdad, after an assassination attempt there against Hussein in 1982.
The three -- Mizher Abdullah Ruweid, his father, Abdullah Kadhim Ruweid, and Ali Daeem Ali, all former local Baath Party officials -- denied any role in the killings.
Special correspondent Naseer Nouri contributed to this report.
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