Twin suicide bombings kill 63 in Baghdad
Middle East Desk Report

BAGHDAD—A pair of suicide car bombs has killed at least 60 mostly Shiite casual labourers in downtown Baghdad as Iraq’s divided government struggled to deal with the escalating violence. The coordinated blasts Tuesday came as leaders in Baghdad and Washington were working to come up with a new political and military formula to halt the rising tide of chaos threatening to tear the fragile country apart.
US President George W. Bush was locked in crisis meetings with policy experts and on Tuesday was to meet Iraq’s top Sunni elected official and hold a video conference with his Baghdad ambassador to decide on major policy changes. In Baghdad, party politicians have been meeting with an eye to restructuring the ruling coalition, while the prime minister hopes to hold a national reconciliation conference on Saturday. At least 60 people were killed and 221 wounded in the devastating blasts that ripped through the busy Tayaran square at 7:00 am (0400 GMT) where Shiite labourers from Sadr City gather to look for day work. Witnesses described how a pair of vehicles were involved in the attack.
First a BMW car rear-ended a police vehicle and exploded, prompting crowds of day labourers and stall holders to take shelter on the other side of the square. Two minutes later a pickup truck ploughed into the crowd and exploded. “After the explosion, not a single person in the square was standing. I thought everyone was dead,” said Khaled Nasser, a labourer who searched the wreckage for four of his companions.
“I found them all cut in half — no legs — and for some I could only find their heads,” he told AFP. Two buildings were severely damaged in the blasts and dozens of shops were burned, while plumbing fixtures and tools from vendors’ stalls lay scattered through the bloody debris. “We are treating 25 people with extremely serious injuries,” a doctor from Ibn al-Nafis hospital said. In the hours afterwards, several more dull explosions and gunfire could be heard around the city. Massive car bombs are the hallmark of Sunni extremist attacks on Shiites in Baghdad and in the past few weeks there have been numerous bloody blasts, including a series in Sadr City last month that killed more than 200 people. The city is in the grip of a cycle of revenge attacks triggered by these blasts as Shiite militias launch mortars and night-time death squad raids on rival Sunni neighbourhoods.
“The attackers are outlaws and without religion,” Sunni speaker of parliament Mahmud Mashhadani said in parliament. “I demand all the armed groups to announce a truce for two months.” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki once again pointed the finger at the takfiris (Sunni extremists) and their “Saddamist allies”. “This massacre shows that those terror groups are endeavouring to create chaos and killing, beside arousing sectarianism in the country,” he said in a statement.