Car Bombing at Market Kills 30 in Shiite Village

A car bomb exploded near an outdoor market in a Shiite village east of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 30 Iraqis and wounding 48 as a new spate of sectarian bloodshed continued for a fourth day.

Iraqi authorities said the deaths were among at least 40 reported throughout the country. The four-day death toll from politically motivated violence rose to about 250.

Police said the bomb blast in the Nahrawan district, a bleak agricultural area of dirt roads and mud-brick homes about 20 miles from Baghdad, occurred near a market around 6:30 p.m. as residents gathered to buy food and mingle.

The explosion destroyed cars and damaged shops. Police said that 30 minutes after the initial blast, insurgents fired mortar rounds into the area, sowing panic and chaos as officers attempted to seal off the area and respond to victims.

The wounded were taken to hospitals in eastern Baghdad.

“They’re getting many casualties,” said a receptionist at Baghdad’s Al Kindi Hospital. “All our staff is trying to save people.”

Sunni Arab insurgents from Iraq and abroad have launched a campaign of car bombings and assassinations against U.S.-led forces and the nation’s Shiite majority, apparently hoping to provoke a civil war that will radicalize Sunnis in Iraq and the region.

The latest onslaught began after U.S. soldiers and forces of the Shiite-led government completed a counterinsurgency operation in the northern city of Tall Afar, which had allegedly become a base for foreign fighters and Iraqi militants.

Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi, who claims to lead Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch, has declared war on Shiites for their actions in Tall Afar, which some Iraqi critics decried as “sectarian cleansing” against the city’s Sunnis.

Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi, a Sunni, visited Tall Afar dignitaries, who “assured him that they understood the importance of the rule of law and rejected extremism and sectarianism,” a government statement said.

Low-scale violence between Sunnis and Shiites has continued for months. On Saturday, police discovered the bodies of nine men in various Baghdad neighborhoods. The victims bore signs of torture and had bullet wounds to the head.

In the ethnically and religiously mixed city of Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of the capital, another car bomb targeting a convoy of Iraqi military vehicles killed one civilian and injured 17, witnesses and officials said.

Despite the pounding they have taken from insurgents, Shiites have for the most part seemed reluctant to take revenge. But Saturday, police reported that armed Shiite members of the Tamimi tribe near the town of Taji, just north of Baghdad, had taken up arms and blocked the country’s main north-south highway, stopping cars and ordering drivers to turn back. A group of gunmen who tried to storm the main Taji police station was repulsed with no casualties reported, an Interior Ministry official said.

Seventeen Shiite members of the tribe were killed by gunmen who pulled them from their homes and shot them execution-style early Wednesday. Terrified of reprisal attacks by Shiites, members of a nearby Sunni tribe had also taken up arms, an official said.

A witness reached by telephone attributed the increased tension to young Shiite men who blocked the road without the consent of tribal elders, and said that U.S. tanks and Iraqi police had moved into the area by midafternoon.