18 Iraqis killed in attack in Baghdad
Eighteen people died Thursday when a car bomb blew up outside a photo studio as members of a wedding party waited for the newlyweds to get their pictures taken.
The explosion ripped through a street in Abu Dshir, a Shiite Muslim district that adjoins the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Dora in south Baghdad, as family and friends celebrated the wedding. Police said most of the 18 killed and 29 wounded were women and children who had been waiting for the bride and groom outside the photo studio near a restaurant.
“A massive blast destroyed the parked cars, severely damaged the restaurant and killed so many women and children,” said Mazin Ali, a vendor who saw the blast. The married couple were stuck inside the studio for half an hour before they were rescued.
“Instead of a wedding it turned into a funeral,” Ali said.
In south Baghdad, a bomb killed two U.S. soldiers and raised the U.S. military’s death toll in Iraq to 3,591, according to icasualties.org, which tracks deaths in Iraq. The U.S. military identified the bomb as an explosively formed penetrator, or EFP, which can puncture the armored plating on Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles.
U.S. commanders and diplomats have accused Iran of providing the weapons to Iraqi Shiite militants for use against U.S. soldiers. On Monday, U.S. commanders also alleged that Iran’s elite Al Quds force and its surrogates in the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah were training Iraqi fighters, recruited from offshoots of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia.
The U.S. military previously declined to specify which soldiers were killed or wounded by EFPs but recently began to reveal that information.
U.S. soldiers killed a militant and wounded six in a raid before dawn around Baghdad’s Sadr City district, the Army said in a statement. The military said the troops were targeting Shiite militants affiliated with Iran’s Al Quds force and fired in self-defense.
A U.S. Army attack helicopter destroyed a vehicle in Sadr City at 7 a.m., killing all four passengers, who were fleeing a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a U.S. base in the New Baghdad neighborhood, spokesman Army Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl told The Times in an e-mail.
Iraqi security forces found 24 bodies around the capital Thursday, the majority of them in west Baghdad, which is the main battlefront between Sunni and Shiite extremists. Most of the bodies had bullet wounds.
Meanwhile, violence flared in the southern city of Samawah as Al Mahdi militiamen fought Iraqi security forces after police barred them from bringing weapons into the nearby city of Rumaitha. The men, who were going to Rumaitha to celebrate the opening of a Sadr office, returned to Samawah and clashed with police, an Iraqi security source said. Sporadic gunfire could be heard in the city throughout the day.
Separately, the U.S. military reported that a helicopter crash Wednesday in Nineveh province was an accident and not caused by enemy fire. One soldier died in the crash, and the military said it believed the helicopter snagged electrical wires.
On the political front, Iraq’s Sunni Arab bloc continued its boycott of the parliament and Cabinet. The Sadr movement joined the growing number of Iraqi groups denouncing plans for a national oil law that the Bush administration hopes can be a building block for reconciliation among the country’s fractious religious and ethnic groups.
“The law is not clear, and it doesn’t apply to the Iraqi reality,” said Sheik Salah Ubaidi, a spokesman for Sadr.
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Times staff writer Raheem Salman contributed to this report.
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