Baghdad, Jan. 18 (Reuters): The wounded were brought to Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital today morning, bloodied and bruised, confused and deafened by the huge blast which threw them to the ground as they walked to work.

About 20 of the injured were taken to Yarmouk, the nearest hospital, carried in on stretchers or in the arms of bystanders.

One man lay screaming as doctors stitched a cut in the side of his head. In the bed beside him, another man shook uncontrollably, his eyes half open as a doctor cleaned and bandaged his wounds. Stretchers rattled through the hospital’s stark corridors, the smell of disinfectant overpowering as doctors mopped up the blood.

“I can’t hear you, I can’t hear,” cried Raqad Iyas Ibrahim, sitting on a bed with her head bandaged and blood congealing across her face. “I saw a car, I really don’t know what happened, I saw windows smashing, then I just fell. I don’t know, I don’t understand,” she said, breaking down in sobs.

Today’s bomber was in a queue of vehicles waiting to get into the US headquarters, a complex protected by blast walls, barbed wire and checkpoints, when he exploded his car.

There are no official estimates of how many Iraqis have been killed since the war began.