Baghdad Blast Kills 35 Waiting for Fuel

A bomb exploded Saturday in an alleyway of a vast Shiite neighborhood where women and children had gathered to collect fuel rations, peppering victims with ball bearings and engulfing them in an inferno that killed at least 35.

Rescuers entering the alley wrapped themselves in wet blankets as they attempted to reach victims whose clothes were on fire.

“We were choosing those who we thought were still alive to carry them out,” said Hassan Moosawi, 26, one of the rescuers. “Their flesh was scalded by the fire.”

Police and hospital officials said 22 of the dead were women and eight were children. At least 36 people were injured.

The attack in Sadr City, a poor, predominantly Shiite neighborhood of 2 million people, was a setback for U.S. efforts to pacify the capital, which has been ravaged by sectarian carnage and paramilitary killings since the February bombing of the Shiite shrine of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.

The alley blast took place as the holy month of Ramadan began for Sunnis and neared for Shiites.

U.S. and Iraqi officials had predicted an increase in violence during Ramadan, when Muslims fast during daylight hours. Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, violence has flared each year during Ramadan.

A buildup of U.S. and Iraqi forces in August briefly slowed the pace of killings in Baghdad, which topped 1,800 in July, but the rate has been increasing. On Friday, a U.S. commander said that although 4,000 additional U.S. troops were patrolling the city’s streets, only a fourth of the 4,000 expected Iraqi troops had shown up.

While the rescue of blast victims was still in progress Saturday, onlookers vented their wrath at the Iraqi government and the United States.

One man, who declined to identify himself, argued that the increased presence of the U.S. military in Baghdad had weakened Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia, which has provided security in Sadr City.

“Before, our youths used to search and protect the people gathering here, but the Americans started to detain them,” the man said. “This is the result.”

Sadr City is a major center of support for Sadr, who controls more than 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament. His militia has been linked to Shiite death squads and has clashed repeatedly with the U.S. military.

Another Sadr City resident, Hussein Radhi Khafaji, suggested that the neighborhood close itself off from the rest of Baghdad.

“We have the capability not to allow the Americans to enter our city! Neither the government nor the Americans will stay here,” he said.

U.S. Army officials said Saturday that they had begun patrols in Sadr City, but out of political considerations had avoided a full-scale operation.

Observance of Ramadan follows a lunar calendar. Sunni Muslims began their fasting Saturday. Based on a different interpretation of when the new moon appears, Shiites will start Monday.

A shadowy group calling itself the Sahaba Soldiers said in an Internet posting that it was responsible for the bombing, and that the blast was a reprisal for attacks on Sunnis, including “forced displacements, burning of mosques, kidnappings and assassinations” by Sadr’s militia.

The claim could not be verified. The group said it had used a car bomb, but the evidence at the scene did not support that claim.

Although authorities had not determined the nature of the bomb, some witnesses said they believed that it was detonated by a woman who mixed with the crowd.

Sadiq Abbas, 36, said survivors told him that a woman wearing a veil put a jerrycan near the entrance and beckoned others to come closer. “Then the explosion happened,” Abbas said.

The bomb went off next to a door in one of the walls. The victims had carried jerrycans to the door, where attendants from an adjacent gas station dispensed gasoline for home generators and kerosene, which was being stockpiled for the coming winter.

The fuel erupted into a fireball.

“A teenager was burning,” said Khafaji, 32. “He climbed this wall to fall on the other side.”

An abaya, the black robe worn by many Iraqi women, was snagged at the top of the wall. Adil Rauf Miftin, 27, said it belonged to his neighbor, Bahiya Sultan, 55, a mother of seven who died, possibly as she was trying to scale the wall. A crumpled bicycle nearby belonged to a 9-year-old boy who also died, he said.

Hundreds of ball bearings from the bomb lay scattered around the alley, where the victims were trapped between two walls a few feet apart.

A prominent Shiite leader said the attack highlighted the desperation of the attackers.

“Only women were there to receive the kerosene,” said Hadi Amri, a parliament member and leader of the Badr Brigade, one of Iraq’s largest Shiite paramilitary groups. “Attacking poor innocents who have no power is their strategy now.”

In another attack in Sadr City, a booby-trapped motorbike exploded near a U.S. military convoy, killing a civilian and wounding six.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army reported the deaths Saturday of three U.S. soldiers. One was killed by a roadside bomb in north Baghdad, and two were killed and three were injured by a roadside bomb in Hawija, in the northern province of Al Tamim. Their names were withheld.

The State Department also reported that an American contractor for the consulate in the southern city of Basra had been killed in a rocket attack Friday. It did not disclose his name.

Also in Basra, the Associated Press reported that a Danish soldier was killed and eight were wounded by a roadside bomb.

A grisly scene unfolded in Baiji, 120 miles north of Baghdad, when armed men in a car tossed a plastic bag containing nine severed heads into a marketplace. Identity cards in the bag named the victims as members of the Iraqi army.

In Tikrit, the predominantly Sunni Arab hometown of former President Saddam Hussein, Police Brig. Gen. Ismael Ijhian was assassinated by a group of men as he left the house of a friend.

In another development Saturday, Iraqi authorities announced the capture of a man they described as a terrorist leader whose group had claimed responsibility for several attacks in the north. U.S. officials had no comment on the report.

Maj. Gen. Qasim Almusawi, a spokesman for the Iraqi Defense Ministry, said a joint U.S. and Iraqi force had arrested Muntasar Hmoud Ilawi Aljiboori, head of Ansar al Sunna, and two subordinates in an area of orchards about 30 miles west of Baqubah. The same group said in an Internet message Saturday that it recently had ambushed 10 Indian and Pakistani pilgrims on the highway to Syria. It claimed they were agents for Shiite militias, and said the 10 had been killed.

The successor to slain Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab Zarqawi resurfaced Saturday in an Internet video.

In the video, three masked men are seen standing behind a kneeling man who is described as a Turkish hostage. Later in the video, a hand with a pistol appears and fires three shots into the man’s head. The shooter is identified as Abu Ayyub Masri, named to lead the group after Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in June.

doug.smith@latimes.com

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Times staff writers Solomon Moore, Suhail Ahmad, Zeena Karim and Saif Rasheed and special correspondents in Najaf, Baqubah, Basra, Kirkuk, Sadr City and Tikrit contributed to this report.