Suicide blast kills 34 in Iraq
Foreign Desk Report

MAHMOUDIYA (Iraq)—A suicide car bomber attacked a hospital south of Baghdad on Thursday, killing 34 people and wounding dozens more as militants stepped up their campaign of violence ahead of elections next month.
The explosives-packed car detonated as Iraqi security forces were gathered outside Mahmoudiya General Hospital and as US civil affairs soldiers were visiting the facility to look at ways to improve it, the US army and witnesses said.
Four US troops were wounded in the blast, but most of those killed and injured were civilians, including Hoda Ali Mahmoud, a 30-year-old woman who had just visited the hospital with her young son, who needed treatment for a cold.
“The glass flew at us,” she said as she sat up in hospital. “His nose was hit and he couldn’t breathe.” The body of her son, less than two years old, lay on the morgue floor at Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad, where many of the wounded were brought.
Hasna Aboud’s son, who was due to get married next week, was also killed. “My 22-year-old son was killed while trying to bring me some medicine,” she said. “I lost my only son”.
The bombing is the latest in a series of suicide attacks and car bomb blasts that have killed nearly 200 people since last Friday, in what appears to be a ratcheting up in violence by insurgents ahead of December 15 parliamentary elections.
The head of the emergency room at the hospital said the explosion had killed 34 people, including seven policemen, three Iraqi soldiers, a doctor and five medical staff. A total of 39 people were wounded, most of them civilians.
In a statement, the US military said the hospital had been the target of the suicide attack, but the bomber had failed to penetrate its security barriers. The building suffered minor damage to its facade, and three nearby houses were badly hit.
Many of the recent attacks in Iraq have been sectarian, with Sunni Arab militants targeting Shi’ite Muslim communities. In one of the worst incidents in recent months, 77 Shi’ites were killed when explosives-strapped bombers blew themselves up inside mosques in the northern town of Khanaqin last week.
Mahmoudiya, about 30 km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, has seen considerable violence in the past two years. It sits in an area dubbed the Triangle of Death for the frequency of attacks. The area consists of a belt of mixed Sunni and Shi’ite towns where sectarian tensions have spilled over, leading to fears Iraq could be sliding toward a full-blown civil war.
The Defense Ministry said earlier that soldiers had found a car west of Baghdad filled with children’s toys booby-trapped with hand grenades and explosives, and a government spokesman said two people had been detained.
US and Iraqi forces are trying to impose nationwide security for next month’s elections, when a four-year parliament will be ushered in for the first time, after several interim Iraqi authorities over the past two years.
The build-up to elections and other key events has been accompanied by a surge in violence in the past and a similar, steady increase in attacks is expected this time around.
As well as battling insurgents in western Iraq, where groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are based, US and Iraqi forces are trying to stem a rash of sectarian killings in Baghdad and other major cities.
On Thursday, a Sunni tribal leader and three of his sons were shot dead in their beds by gunmen dressed in Iraqi army uniforms. The Defense Ministry denied Iraqi troops were responsible, saying the killers were terrorists in disguise.
Leaders from Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority, which was politically dominant under Saddam Hussein, accuse the Shi’ite- run Interior Ministry of sanctioning anti-Sunni death squads run by Shi’ite militias. The government denies the claims. At the same time, Sunni Arab insurgents carry out near daily suicide and other attacks on Shi’ites, creating a volatile atmosphere of danger and mistrust.
US commanders hope that if they can kill Zarqawi, whose group has carried out some of Iraq’s deadliest attacks, it will have a dampening impact on the insurgency, which in the past 24 hours has killed four US soldiers, raising the total of American dead since the war began to more than 2,100.
Training Iraqi security forces so they can take on the insurgency themselves is the key plank in Washington’s plan for steadily withdrawing the 155,000 US troops serving in Iraq. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested this week that a troop reduction may start fairly soon.
But a significant pullout is not expected until well into 2006, as a strong presence is needed until the new Iraqi government has settled in and more Iraqi police and military battalions are fully trained — only a handful are so far.