Brick shop fronts collapsed, amid cascades of glass that extended for 200m. Two cars hurtled in the air, landing on their sides.
The lethal impact of the blast was augmented by cruel circumstance. Several witnesses said an oil tanker had been parked in the area moments before the bombing.
Five cars along a slip road were carbonized and flames licked the first-floor windows of buildings.
One of the burnt-out cars had contained a family with three children, said Hisham Madloul, picking his way through the bloodstains and debris in flip-flops.
"There were three families in the building upstairs and many children," he said. "We have committed no sin. We are not guilty. Why are they doing this? We are innocent people."
He paused for breath, and went on. "What does Bush want?"
It was not a question Alaa Ahmed, 12, was equipped to answer from his bed at al-Kindi hospital.
He lay on his pink pillow, with his head and right hand swathed in bandages, gazing vacantly with huge brown eyes at the circle of white coats around him.
Above his bed, the doctors said several of the 21 people travelling in Alaa's minibus had been brought to hospital, some horribly burnt, some with grievous internal injuries and others dead on arrival.
The US Central Command said Iraqi forces had been stationing military hardware in civilian areas.
"While the coalition goes to great lengths to avoid injury to civilians and damage to civilian facilities, in some cases such damage is unavoidable when the regime places military weapons near civilian areas," the Central Command said in a statement.
Another Pentagon official, General Stanley McChrystal, did not rule out that an Iraqi rather than a US missile hit the apartments.
"We know for a fact something landed there, but we don't know for a fact whether it was US or Iraqi," he said. "We do know that we did not target anything in the vicinity."
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