Iraqi suicide bomber kills 17 workers
Pastor Dale Morgan
Sunday November 19, 4:09 PM Reuters*
Iraqi suicide bomber kills 17 workers*
HILLA, Iraq (Reuters) - At least 17 people were killed on Sunday when a
suicide bomber exploded his vehicle among day labourers waiting to be
hired in the central Iraq city of Hilla, scene of some of the deadliest
sectarian bomb attacks.
Police in the mainly Shi'ite city 100 (60 miles) south of Baghdad said
49 people were wounded in the early morning blast, when hot shrapnel
tore through the crowd of workers as they gathered around the bomber's
minibus.
"I was standing with other labourers when the minibus came and the
driver asked for labourers. Everybody ran towards him and then he
exploded his car," Ali Mohammed told Reuters as he lay in a local
hospital, his left thigh bandaged.
His life was probably saved by the fact that he was slow in reaching the
vehicle and was standing at the back of the crowd when the bomb exploded.
"I saw the fire and collapsed on the ground," he said.
The blast came against a backdrop of continuing bloodshed between
majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis that has killed thousands of
Iraqis and raised fears that the country is teetering on the edge of
all-out civil war.
Hilla, close to the site of ancient Babylon, is surrounded by Sunni
rural areas that are havens for insurgents and al Qaeda suicide bombers.
It has seen some of the deadliest sectarian bomb attacks over the past
two years, including the bloodiest single blast in Iraq, when 125
people, many of them police recruits, were killed by a suicide car
bomber in February 2005.
In August, a bomb apparently left on a parked bicycle blasted a crowd of
young Iraqi men outside an army recruiting office killing 12 people.
Sunday's blast followed the killing of a prominent Shi'ite Islamist
politician on Saturday in what looked like a sectarian assassination.
Ali al-Adhadh of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI) was shot dead with his wife as he drove in mainly Sunni west
Baghdad.
Minority Sunni Arabs were enraged last week after a warrant of arrest
was issued for leading Iraqi Sunni cleric Harith al- Dari on charges of
inciting terrorism, accusing the Shi'ite-led government of Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki sectarianism.
Maliki's six-month-old national unity government has struggled to curb
the rampant sectarian violence gripping Iraq but is coming under growing
U.S. pressure to show some progress in reaching a political
accommodation with Sunnis and reining in militias blamed for much of the
bloodshed.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appealed to Iraqis not to let
the sectarianism destroy their country.
Rice said during a visit to Vietnam on Saturday that Iraqis "have one
future and that is a future together. They don't have a future if they
try to stay apart".
(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami in Baghdad)