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A policeman stands at the site of the car bomb blast in Baghdad on Tuesday. (Reuters)
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Baghdad, March 19 (Reuters): A dozen car bombs and suicide blasts tore into Shia districts across Baghdad and south of the Iraqi capital today, killing more than 50 people on the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.
Sunni insurgents linked to al Qaida are regaining ground in Iraq, invigorated by the war next door in Syria and have stepped up attacks on Shia targets in an attempt to provoke a wider sectarian confrontation.
One car bomb exploded in a busy Baghdad market, three detonated in the Shia district of Sadr City and another near the entrance of the heavily fortified Green Zone that sent a plume of dark smoke into the air alongside the Tigris river.
A suicide bomber in a truck attacked a police base in a Shia town south of the capital, officials said. “I was driving my taxi and suddenly I felt my car rocked. Smoke was all around. I saw two bodies on the ground. People were running and shouting everywhere,” said Ali Radi, a taxi driver caught in one of the blasts in Baghdad’s Sadr City.
A decade after US and western troops swept Saddam from power, Iraq still struggles with insurgents, sectarian friction and political feuds among Shia, Sunni and Kurdish factions.
In a sign of concern over security, the cabinet today postponed local elections in two provinces, Anbar and Nineveh, for up to six months because of threats to electoral workerse, according to Maliki’s media adviser Ali al-Moussawi. The polls will go ahead elsewhere on April 20.
No group claimed responsibility for the Baghdad blasts, but Islamic State of Iraq, a wing of al Qaida, has vowed to take back ground lost in its war with US troops. This year the group has carried out a string of high-profile attacks.
Violence is still below the bloody height of the sectarian slaughter that killed tens of thousands after Sunni Islamists bombed the Shia Al Askari shrine in 2006.
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