More than a dozen car bombs and suicide blasts tore through Shi’ite Muslim districts in the Iraqi capital Baghdad and other areas yesterday, killing nearly 60 people on the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.
Sunni Islamist insurgents linked to al-Qaeda are regaining ground in Iraq, invigorated by the war next door in Syria. They have stepped up attacks on Shi’ite targets in an attempt to provoke wider sectarian strife.
One car bomb exploded in a busy Baghdad market, three detonated in the Shi’ite district of Sadr City and another near the entrance of the heavily fortified Green Zone that sent a plume of dark smoke into the air alongside the River Tigris.
A suicide bomber in a truck attacked a police base in a Shi’ite town south of thecapital, and another blew himself up inside a restaurant to target a police major in the northern city of Mosul.
“I was driving my taxi and suddenly I felt my car rocked. Smoke was all around. I saw two bodies on the ground. People were running and shouting everywhere,” said Ali Radi, a taxi driver caught in one of the blasts in Baghdad’s Sadr City.
The Iraq war began shortly before dawn in Baghdad on Thursday, March 20, 2003, with US air strikes on the capital. Shortly afterwards, President George W. Bush, addressing Americans on television late on March 19 US time, said the offensive was under way.
Now a decade after US and Western troops swept Saddam from power, Iraq still struggles with insurgents, sectarian friction and political feuds among Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish factions who share power in the government of Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
In a sign of concern over security, the Cabinet yesterday postponed local elections in two provinces, Anbar and Nineveh, for up to six months because of threats to electoral workers and violence there, according to Maliki’s media adviser Ali al-Moussawi. The polls will go ahead elsewhere today.
No group claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attacks, but Islamic State of Iraq, a wing of al-Qaeda, has vowed to take back ground lost in its war with US troops. This year the group has carried out a string of high-profile attacks.
Violence is still below the height of the sectarian slaughter that killed tens of thousands after Sunni Islamists bombed the Shi’ite Al Askari shrine in 2006, provoking a wave of retaliation by Shi’ite militias. But security officials say al-Qaeda’s local wing is regrouping in the vast desert of Anbar province bordering Syria and suicide bombers have carried out attacks nearly twice a week since January, a rate not seen for several years in Iraq.
Further complicating security, thousands of Sunni protesters are also rallying in Anbar against Maliki, whose Shi’ite-led government they accuse of marginalising their minority sect since the fall of Sunni strongman Saddam.
After Operation Iraqi Freedom promised to liberate the Iraqi people, Iraq has struggled with a decade that drove the country into sectarian mayhem which killed tens of thousands and the turmoil of a young democracy emerging out of dictatorship.