Baghdad Market Bombing Kills 66

Locals look over the wreckage at the scene of a truck bombing in a Baghdad market. Police said the blast destroyed 14 vehicles and 22 shops and stalls. Officials said explosives and artillery shells were hidden under fruit in a truck. (By Karim Kadim -- Associated Press)

It was impossible to independently confirm the accounts given by the two men. Although some of the details, such as the home's location, coincided with those given by the U.S. military official, it was also impossible to immediately reconcile differences, such as whether the alleged rape victim was 15 or 20.

Omar Janabi said relatives have given permission for U.S. investigators to exhume the young woman's body.

Janabi spoke to a Washington Post special correspondent at the home of tribal leaders in Mahmudiyah. The other neighbor had left Mahmudiyah, fearing retaliation, and talked separately to another Washington Post special correspondent but refused to be identified.

U.S. soldiers initially told residents that the four dead Iraqis were victims of Sunni Arab insurgents -- which puzzled neighbors, who knew the family was Sunni, Janabi said. The other neighbor said he was first told the family had been killed by a Shiite militia.

In Sadr City, home to more than 2 million Shiites and scene of Saturday's bombing, angry survivors made clear how quickly a resurgence of bomb attacks -- typically blamed on Sunni insurgent groups -- could undermine government efforts to overcome sectarian divisions.

"They called for unity?'' demanded a man who identified himself as Abu Hassan al-Thahabi, his hands and feet blackened with soot and grease from pulling the dead and injured out of the wreckage of the bombing. "This proves to the Shiites that there is no unity."

Saturday's bombing was also the deadliest since a U.S. airstrike killed the most prominent leader of the Sunni insurgency, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on June 7. U.S. military officers and academics alike had predicted at least a brief surge in attacks immediately after Zarqawi's killing, saying militant Sunni groups would want to show they had survived his loss.

Even before Zarqawi's killing, however, massive bombings like Saturday's had become less and less frequent. The gradual decrease was attributed to several factors, including better defenses against bombings and the intense, often deadly pressure that Shiite-led governments have placed on the Sunni minority, leaving some insurgent groups more willing to at least try political solutions.

At the same time, however, the frequency of smaller multiple-fatality bombings reached its highest point of the war, according to the Brookings Institute. And sectarian killings -- blamed largely on Shiite militias with ties to the government -- have left an average of more than 1,000 victims at Baghdad's main morgue each month since February.

The surge in sectarian killings brought greater U.S. military pressure on Shiite religious militias, notably the Mahdi Army loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. In Sadr City, fear of questioning or detention by U.S. troops has led the Mahdi Army's gunmen to switch from their trademark black uniforms to civilian clothes and to handle their AK-47 assault rifles, pistols and rocket-propelled grenades more discreetly.

Thahabi, an official in Sadr's movement, complained that the militia's usual checkpoints would have stopped Saturday's truck bomb but that militia members had abandoned them that morning when they saw U.S. troops in the area.

Sadr officials said the bomb -- a mix of explosives and artillery shells, with ball bearings nearly the size of marbles and scrap metal added for shrapnel -- was hidden in a truck under a load of fruit. The truck, with a suicide driver at the wheel, blew up on a street crowded on both sides with shops and market stalls, leaving a crater the size of a wading pool in the pavement.

Two Washington Post special correspondents in Mahmudiyah contributed to this report.