Iraqi Brothers Go Home in Coffins; 2 Days of Attacks Claim 180 Lives

At their uncle Hamid Ghatti Fares’ behest, the Rashid brothers left the desperation and unemployment of Nasiriya down south to look for construction jobs in the Iraqi capital.

And under their uncle’s care, the two brothers, Hossein, 33, and Tahseen, 27, were returned to their home in the south Wednesday, their mangled bodies laid side by side in simple wooden coffins strapped atop a Korean-made minibus.

“What can I say? How can I describe this feeling?” said Fares, a 57-year-old Baghdad cigarette vendor, whimpering as he boarded the vehicle and prepared to deliver his nephews’ remains to their father -- his brother -- in Nasiriya. “It will be a long ride.”

The brothers were killed Wednesday when a suicide driver detonated a massive car bomb in a crowd of day laborers in the largely Shiite Muslim district of Kadhimiya. It was one of the deadliest days of insurgent attacks in the capital since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

By nightfall, bombings and ambushes in Baghdad had killed at least 141 Iraqis and injured 228, most of whom were Shiites. Between 6:50 a.m. and 2:10 p.m., 10 car bombs were set off in the capital.

An additional 17 people were shot execution-style in a massacre in a Shiite enclave near Taji, north of the capital.

The violence continued this morning, when a suicide car bomber in the Dora district of south Baghdad killed at least 16 police officers.

The bombing, targeting a police convoy, also injured 13 officers and eight civilians, an Interior Ministry official said.

In the Camp Sara neighborhood, authorities found the bodies of three Iraqis believed to be Shiite pilgrims headed to the southern city of Karbala. The corpses of three other Iraqis were found in the Shiite Shuala district. All six had been shot.

Wednesday’s barrage of explosions plunged the capital once again into fear and despair. Gunfire and sirens rang out as black smoke rose into the sky. Police and soldiers choked traffic with checkpoints. In east Baghdad, automatic weapons fire continued into the night.

The violence appeared to be retaliation for a recent U.S.-Iraqi offensive against rebels in the northern city of Tall Afar that Iraqi officials said killed at least 150 insurgents. The attacks also seemed designed to stoke tension between the country’s Shiites, who are the majority, and Sunni Arabs, who with foreign fighters are driving the insurgency.

The insurgent group led by Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the day’s assaults in an Internet posting.

“Al Qaeda Organization in Iraq ... has declared war against Shiites in all of Iraq,” the audio recording said. “As for the government, servants of the crusaders headed by [Prime Minister] Ibrahim Jafari, they have declared a war on Sunnis in Tall Afar. You have ... started the attacks, and you won’t see mercy from us.”

A senior U.S. military official, on condition of anonymity, said the attacks were evidence of insurgents’ weakness against Iraq’s nascent security forces. The insurgents “failed to stand up to the assault up north, so they slink away and kill civilians in Baghdad,” he said. “It is astonishing that they can try to claim some victory from pure murder.”

John Arquila, a counterinsurgency specialist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, offered a similar assessment.

“The insurgent networks in Iraq have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to mount substantial operations on short notice, particularly when the targets are ‘soft,’ i.e., innocent civilians.... It takes the insurgents much longer to mount operations against coalition forces, when they choose to do anything more than plant bombs or run suicide attacks.”

Five of Wednesday’s car bombs targeted U.S. patrols, injuring at least two Americans. In one foiled attack, a man of Syrian origin rammed a car bomb into an American tank, but it failed to explode and he was captured, a U.S. military officer said. Three bombs targeted Iraqi security officials, killing three of them.

But ordinary Iraqis, almost all Shiites, bore the brunt of the attacks. One car bomb in the Shuala district targeted a group of people waiting for a bus. At least four were killed, according to the Interior Ministry.

In Taji, one witness said a group of at least 50 men in Iraqi army uniforms pulled 17 members of the mostly Shiite Tamimi tribe out of their homes, lined them up against a wall and executed them.

“The people who were killed have nothing to do with the Americans, the government or security forces,” Mohammed Baqer Tamimi, a Taji produce wholesaler, said in a telephone interview. “Some sold vegetables, some sold ice, and some were taxi drivers.”

The car bomb in Kadhimiya, though, was the day’s deadliest incident, killing 112 people, the Interior Ministry said.

Some witnesses said the suicide bomber posed as a potential employer; dozens of poor mostly Shiite young men crowded around the vehicle in hopes of landing a job.

The blast sent blood and human remains showering down upon the square, a traffic circle of teahouses and small shops. Ghazi Faisal Ali, 56, dragged victims into his coffee shop, which filled quickly with smoke and became smeared with blood.

“I knew them all because many come here for tea every day,” he said. “It is their one moment of rest.”

Hours after the explosion, women walking by the scene covered their eyes and gasped, overwhelmed by the smell of burned flesh.

The lobby of the nearby Kadhimiya hospital had been turned into an overflow emergency room. Stacks of bandages and saline intravenous solution lay atop the receptionist’s counter. Flies swarmed around bloodied, half-conscious patients.

Many of the injured said they were unemployed bricklayers, painters and construction workers from Iraq’s south. The young men told similar stories of paying $7 or so for a taxi ride up to Baghdad and staying in $1-a-night flophouses for the chance to earn as much as $10 a day working on building projects in the capital.

“I have a wife and a child,” said Salif Sayid Jawad, a 34-year-old bricklayer from the southern city of Diwaniya, who suffered burns and shrapnel wounds in the bombing. “I have to come here for work.”

The attack was a particularly rough blow for the Kadhimiya district, which two weeks ago saw almost 1,000 people killed in a stampede during a Shiite religious procession.

“What is the reason for killing those innocent people? They work to eat. If they don’t work, they will not eat for the day,” said Hashim Naji, a 23-year-old employee of a shoe factory, recovering from wounds he sustained in the Kadhimiya attack. “They are not officials. They don’t represent a threat to anyone.”

The violence began hours after American and Iraqi troops wrapped up the counterinsurgency offensive in Tall Afar, near the Syrian border. Critics said the joint offensive in the city of 200,000, which is a mix of Shiite and Sunni members of Iraq’s Turkmen minority, exacerbated sectarian tensions and sparked the day’s violence.

“When one of the cities is subjected to invasion and total annihilation, as what happened in Fallouja and now in Tall Afar, this is the natural reaction,” Salman Jumaili, a Sunni Arab politician, said in a television interview. “We blame the organized government forces who are unable to deal wisely with people and without appearing to conduct sectarian cleansing.”

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Times staff writers Saif Rasheed and Shamil Aziz contributed to this report.