Sunday, Mar 30, 2003
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Members of a family pray for their kin killed when a bomb landed in a busy market in Baghdad's al-Shoala district on Friday.
A suicide bomber in a taxi killed four American soldiers at a checkpoint in south-central Iraq. American troops in the region pushed north to battle Iraqi paramilitary forces who have been hampering their advance to Baghdad, while other units paused for fuel supplies as they prepared for an all-out assault on the Iraqi capital. In Basra, Iraq's besieged second-largest city where British troops have encountered heavy resistance, U.S. warplanes fired laser-guided missiles and destroyed a building where some 200 Iraqi paramilitary fighters were believed to be meeting on Friday evening. A British soldier was killed after armoured vehicles came under attack in a possible "friendly fire" incident in southern Iraq, defence officials today said in London. Five other soldiers were injured. Authorities in Kuwait said Iraq fired a missile of its own that damaged a popular shopping mall and injured two persons in Kuwait City. Planes were screaming over the capital, Baghdad, drawing anti-aircraft fire, and the blazes started by authorities to conceal targets seemed to be burning furiously, sending darker-than-usual clouds over the city on an otherwise clear day. Despite the fires and intermittent explosions, Saturday saw the heaviest traffic on the streets of Baghdad since the war broke out. Many shops were open in the commercial districts and thousands of residents were on the streets. At the Al-Nasr market in the working-class district of al-Shoala, crowds of mourners wailed amid bloodstains and piles of wreckage. Blood-soaked children's slippers sat on the street not far from a crater blasted into the ground. At the scene of the Friday bombing, women were sobbing outside homes where some of the victims lived. Men cried and hugged each other as a funeral procession passed through the market. Witnesses said the bombing occurred around 6 p.m. when the market was at its busiest. They said they saw an aircraft flying high overhead just before the blast. "Why do they make mistakes like these if they have the technology?" asked Abdel-Hadi Adai, who said he lost his 27-year-old brother-in-law. "There are no military installations anywhere near here." The U.S. Central Command in Qatar, which has denied that coalition forces target civilian neighbourhoods, said it was looking into the incident. The Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, told reporters that 68 people were killed and 107 wounded in Baghdad alone between Friday evening and Saturday morning. In addition, 74 people were killed and 244 wounded across the rest of the country, he said. "These are cowardly air raids," he told Lebanon's Al-Hayat LBC satellite television. In one incident, Mr. Sahhaf said, coalition forces fired a cluster bomb at an ambulance carrying a wounded man to hospital. The wounded man, the driver and a nurse were killed. "We thank the superpower (America) and we congratulate this hated (Tony) Blair. Now they are bombing ambulances," he said. "We are encouraging several groups, lawyers, professors of international law in order to present a lawsuit against those war criminals." Mr. Sahhaf rejected a new U.N. Security Council resolution adopted unanimously on Friday renewing the seven-year-old oil-for-food programme under the sole charge of the U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. "Only Iraq can administer this programme," he said. "They have made a mockery of the (1995) resolution" which paved the way for the launch of the programme on which an estimated 60 per cent of Iraqis now depend for food and medicine, the Minister said. "Any measure which does not involve the Iraqi Government cannot be implemented on the ground." AP, AFP
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