BAGHDAD - A car bomb ripped through a wholesale food market in western Baghdad on Sunday, flattening cars and shops and killing at least 27 people in one of the deadliest attacks in the capital in recent days.
The attack came amid an 11-week-old crackdown by U.S.-led forces intended to bring stability to Baghdad.
The blast, which erupted about noon in the mixed Sunni-Shiite Baiyaa neighborhood, devastated the market, reducing cars and trucks to their charred skeletons and ripping the roofs and exteriors off of shops. In addition to the dead, dozens of others were injured.
Pools of blood gathered in the dirt streets. Hospital officials said two pickup trucks filled with body parts were brought to the morgue.
"I was waiting near a shop to lift some boxes, when I saw the owner of the shop fall down," said Satar Hussein, 22, a worker in the market. "I helped him inside the shop, but he was already dead. The next thing I felt was pain in my left shoulder and some people rushing me to the hospital."
Ali Hamid, 25, the owner of a food store, said he was selling boxes of Pepsi when he was hit with shrapnel in his hand.
"I fainted, and the next thing I remember is some people putting me in a pickup with two dead bodies and rushing me to the hospital," he said, condemning the attack as "a terrorist act aiming at creating more sectarian tension and strife."
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Baiyaa, the scene of frequent sectarian violence including a bombing and mortar attack last week that killed seven people.
The blast was part of a wave of violence across Iraq on Sunday that killed at least 43 people Sunday.
Meanwhile, U.S. and Iraqi troops continued their operations in the city, raiding the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City early Sunday and killing at least eight insurgents in a gunbattle, the U.S. military said.
The military said its troops returned fire after being attacked by militants armed with rifles and rockets who were hiding in a building. Four other armed men attacked them from behind a car, and the troops again returned fire, destroying the car, the military said.
The troops had targeted the area based on intelligence indicating the presence of an insurgent cell that smuggled weapons from Iran, sent fighters to the neighboring country for training and was involved in a kidnapping network, the military said.
The U.S.-led forces destroyed a torture room and a large cache of weapons, including over 150 mortar rounds, during the raid, the military said.
The violence came a day after Al Qaeda in Iraq branded the country's Sunni vice president a "criminal" for participating in the U.S.-backed government.
The verbal assault on Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi was purportedly delivered by al Qaeda leader Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, in an audiotape posted on an extremist Web site only days after Iraqi authorities claimed he had been killed.
Hours later, a video was released showing Osama bin Laden's deputy mocking the nearly three-month-old Baghdad security plan, recounting the Apr. 12 suicide bombing at the Iraqi parliament cafeteria in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, when a bomber slipped through security and blew himself up amid lunching lawmakers, killing one Sunni legislator.
The attack cast heavy doubt about progress in the latest U.S.-Iraqi bid to clamp off violence in the capital. Iraq's al Qaeda front group claimed responsibility for the bombing.
"And lest Bush worry, I congratulate him on the success of his security plan, and I invite him on the occasion for a glass of juice, but in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament in the middle of the Green Zone," Ayman al-Zawahri said, according to the Washington-based SITE Institute, which monitors militant statements.
Al-Zawahri also blamed Iraq's Shiite-Sunni violence on "individuals and groups in Iraq who do not want the coalition forces to leave" but claimed al-Qaida fighters in Iraq were "nearing closer to victory over their enemy, despite this sectarian fighting" that has convulsed the country.
U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, on a trip to Baghdad with other lawmakers, said Saturday that she is not convinced that the Iraqi leaders have a sense of urgency about achieving political reconciliation. She said she told Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the country's most powerful Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, that the Iraqi parliament should refrain from taking a recess this summer.
"As we are doing the military surge, we should have a political surge by the government," said Snowe, a Republican, during a conference call with reporters. "They (U.S. troops) should not be on the front lines while the parliament is at recess for two months."
Snowe said al-Hakim told her no decision had been made but he expected parliament to cut short its recess.
In other violence Sunday, a car bomb near the Ministry of Labor in Baghdad killed four people and wounded eight others, police said.
Insurgents exploded another car bomb outside a police station in the town of Samarra, about 100 kilometres north of Baghdad, killing two police and a bystander, police said. A few minutes later, militants in the town attacked a police checkpoint near the al-Askari shrine, killing another police officer, police said.
A gunbattle between unidentified gunmen and Iraqi forces in a market in the town of Baqouba 56 kilometres northeast of Baghdad killed two civilians dead, police said.
In the town of Kut, 160 kilometres southeast of Baghdad, a roadside bomb outside a teacher's house killed three of his children, all of them under the age of 10, police said. The parents were not injured in the attack.
Police also found the bullet-riddled bodies of three men, who were blindfolded, handcuffed and dumped in the Tigris River in the town of Suwayrah, 40 kilometres south of Baghdad.
