Two bomb blasts ripped through busy areas of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 11 people in the latest violence to rock Iraq’s capital just weeks before the US military is scheduled to pull out of cities nationwide.
In the bloodiest attack, 10 people were killed and 37 wounded when a pick-up truck blew up in a wholesale produce market near Dura, a mixed district that until a year ago was one of the city’s most dangerous areas.
The market carnage in southern Baghdad was followed by a car bomb blast hours later in the central shopping district of Karrada that killed one civilian and wounded seven, security officials said.
Violence has spiked in recent weeks after two years of steady improvement in security across the country, but Iraq has insisted that it will stick to a deadline for US troops to withdraw from towns and cities by June 30.
“Ten people were killed by the explosion of a car bomb in the al-Rasheed vegetable market just south of the al-Dura district,” an interior ministry official said.
Workers at the market said a man drove a small pick-up truck in to the Rasheed, one of Baghdad’s largest cooperative produce markets, parked the vehicle and left.
Women were among those wounded when it exploded, they said.
“It was a huge explosion. We panicked, rushing inside our shops and offices,” said Hussein Khalid, 35, a business owner in the market. “Smoke was everywhere and we could smell the blood of the injured. But we were afraid there would be another bomb. We waited for a few minutes and then we rushed out to help. Blood was everywhere. We are all very upset because most of the dead and injured are our friends or people we often deal with.”
Amid the wreckage of destroyed stalls and burned-out cars, survivors said that police had failed to properly search vehicles bringing fruit and vegetables from the countryside.
Police found another bomb buried under vegetables in the back of a small white pick-up truck parked outside the market gate, but a disposal unit safely detonated it, an AFP reporter said.
Until Iraqi security forces clamped down last year, Dura was the scene of fierce gun battles between Sunni Arab militants linked to al-Qaeda and Shiite militias.
Later on Wednesday evening eight civilians were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded outside a coffee shop popular with young people who play billiards.
Gunmen also killed a policeman from Baghdad’s special cases unit in a drive-by shooting, peppering his car with bullets in the capital’s eastern district of Zaiyuna, a police source said.
In the northern city of Mosul, considered by the US military to be the last urban stronghold of Islamist militants in Iraq, one civilian was killed and two others were wounded by a roadside bomb, local police said.
Also on Wednesday, an oil pipeline near the disputed oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk was blown up, interrupting pumping from 15 wells but not affecting exports, a North Oil Company official said.
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