A car bomb tore through a busy market in the Shiite holy city of Kufa yesterday morning, killing at least 16 people and wounding 70 in an attack sure to further inflame tensions between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite populations.
The attack came a day after Iraq's Sunni vice president threatened to leave the Shiite-dominated government unless key unspecified amendments to the constitution were made by next Tuesday.
The blast at Kufa struck at about 10am. in an area that also included a school and the mayor's office. The 16 killed included women and children, said Salim Naima, spokesman of the Najaf health department.
"It was a huge explosion, its force threw me a few meters away from my wife," said Hussein Abid Matrod, a 38-year old taxi driver who was shopping with his wife and suffered shrapnel wounds to his back and legs. "I saw many people on the ground as smoke mixed with dust, and the smell of the gunpowder was everywhere."
Panicked people ran through the corridors searching for their relatives at al-Furat al-Awsat hospital in nearby Najaf. Women in black abayas, traditional Islamic cloaks, pounded their chests and faces in grief.
"We are poor people looking for anything to secure our livelihood and we have nothing to do with politics. Why do they do this to us?" asked Firas Abdul-Karim, a 23-year-old day laborer who was wounded in the blast.
The revered Kufa mosque was about 400m from the blast. Millions of Shiite Muslim pilgrims visit the shrines at Kufa and its sister holy city of Najaf, home to top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani as well as radical anti-US Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The predominantly Shiite southern areas have seen a spike in violence and unrest, blamed in part on militants who have fled a security crackdown in Baghdad.
On April 28, a suicide car bomber killed 68 people in a crowded commercial area near two of Iraq's most sacred Shiite shrines in Karbala, 70km northwest of Kufa. That attack came two weeks after a car bombing killed 47 people killed and wounded 224 wounded in the same area.
Hillah, about 95km south of Baghdad, also has been hit by some of the deadliest bombings this year, including a double suicide attack that killed 120 Shiite pilgrims and another one that killed 73 people in a market. Kufa itself was struck by a blast on Dec. 30 at the fish market that killed 31 people.
Also yesterday, a roadside bomb went off next to a passing mini bus in the Shiite area of Zafaraniyah on the southeastern outskirts of Baghdad, killing three passengers and injuring five others, police said.
At least 68 people were killed or found dead nationwide on Monday, police said, including the bullet-riddled bodies of 30 men found in Baghdad — the apparent victims of sectarian death squads.
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