BAGHDAD, 19 April 2007 — Car bombs killed nearly 170 people in Baghdad yesterday in the deadliest attacks in the city since US and Iraqi forces launched a security *****down aimed at halting the country’s slide into civil war.

One car bomb alone in the mainly Shiite Sadriya neighborhood killed 118 people and wounded 139, police said. The apparently coordinated attacks — there were five within a short space of time — occurred hours after Shiite Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki said Iraq would take security control of the whole country from foreign forces by the end of the year. More than 200 people were wounded in total.

Maliki is under growing pressure to say when US troops will leave, but the attacks in mainly Shiite areas of Baghdad underscored the huge security challenges.

“I saw dozens of dead bodies. Some people were burned alive inside minibuses. Nobody could reach them after the explosion,” said a witness at Sadriya, describing scenes of mayhem at an intersection where the bomb exploded near a market.

“There were pieces of flesh all over the place. Women were screaming and shouting for their loved ones who died,” said the witness who did not wish to be identified, adding many of the dead were women and children. One man waving his arms in the air screamed hysterically: “Where’s Maliki? Let him come and see what is happening here.”

US and Iraqi forces began deploying thousands more troops onto Baghdad’s streets in February. Sectarian death squads killings have declined, but car bombs are much harder to stop, US military officials say. The attacks could inflame sectarian passions in Baghdad, especially among the Mahdi Army militia of anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr.

The militia has been keeping a low profile since the *****down began. Washington calls the militia the greatest threat to peace in Iraq. Sadr withdrew his six ministers from Maliki’s Cabinet on Monday to press for a pullout timetable for the 146,000 US troops in Iraq.

Among the other attacks, police said a suicide car bomber killed 35 people at a checkpoint in Sadr City, the stronghold of the firebrand cleric. A third car bomb attack in the capital killed 10 people, police said.

At Sadriya, television footage showed a thick, dark plume of smoke rising at the scene of the bombing. Fire fighters rushed to put out flames on burning bodies, while rescue workers tried to retrieve bodies from the blackened hulks of cars.

The Sadriya bombing was the highest death toll in a single attack in Baghdad since a truck bomb killed 135 people and wounded 305 in the same area on Feb. 3. Baghdad has been the epicenter of violence in Iraq since suspected Sunni Al-Qaeda militants blew up a Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra in February 2006.

In a speech at a ceremony marking the handover of the southern Maysan province from British to Iraqi control, Maliki said three provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region would be next, followed by Karbala and Wasit provinces.

“Then it will be province by province until we achieve (this transfer) before the end of the year,” Maliki said in the speech delivered on his behalf by National Security Adviser Mowaffaq Al-Rubaie.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has decided to write off 80 percent of the more than $15 billion it is owed by Iraq, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said in Cairo yesterday.

As part of its efforts to help Iraq rebuild, the Bush administration has been pressing Iraq’s creditors to follow Washington’s lead and write off debt they are owed by Baghdad.

Asked at a news conference at the Arab League in Cairo whether the Kingdom had agreed to write off 80 percent of Iraq’s debt, Prince Saud said: “Yes, yes.” Asked when the decision was reached, he said: “When we finished the negotiations with Iraq.”

Source : aljazeera.com

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it's bad for the iraky people.
it is necessary that they are linked to beat these assassins of
innocent
women and children