Attack on Market and a Roadside Bombing Kill 28 Iraqis

April 25, 20004
By JOHN F. BURNS


BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 24 — At least 14 Iraqis were killed Saturday when mortar bombs or rockets were fired into a crowded chicken market in Sadr City, the district on Baghdad's outskirts that is a stronghold of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, Iraqi police officers and hospital officials said.

Violence also increased across much of Iraq. A roadside bomb in Iskandariya, 30 miles south of Baghdad, killed 14 Iraqis traveling to the capital on a bus, a doctor at a local hospital said.

At least nine American soldiers and sailors were killed in three separate insurgent attacks, and a marine died of wounds suffered 10 days ago. The deaths brought the total number of American soldiers killed so far in April to 111.

In the latest attack on American forces, suicide bombers mounted waterborne attacks in the south on the oil terminal at Basra, Reuters reported. Two American sailors died and several were wounded, according to the United States Navy.

The was no damage to the terminal, but oil production was immediately suspended. On Thursday, coordinated car bombings killed 74 people in Basra.

At Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown 110 miles north of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber who detonated his vehicle near an American military base in the center of the city was reported to have killed at least four Iraqi policemen, and to have wounded 16 other Iraqis caught near shops that were torn apart by the blast.

In Falluja, the insurgent stronghold 30 miles west of Baghdad, relatives said a 2-year-old had been killed and six people had been wounded when one of three shells fired into a residential neighborhood hit a residence. Over Friday night, Marines killed about 30 Iraqi insurgents in a firefight outside Falluja, Col. John Coleman told Reuters.

Seven G.I.'s were killed in earlier incidents.

Despite the large number of deaths on Saturday, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the American military command, said overall violence did not appear to be rising to the high levels of the first two weeks in April.

In Sadr City, a center of festering unrest in Baghdad, the market attack appeared to heighten anti-American feelings. American troops responding to the attack were met with shouts of abuse from angry crowds, some of whom accused American helicopters of firing missiles at the market. General Kimmitt said occupation forces were "certainly not" responsible.

Anything that stirs the volatile mood in Sadr City is a major concern for American commanders as they consider a new Marine offensive in Falluja. Though the target of a new Falluja offensive would be Sunni Muslim insurgents, Shiite clerics with mass followings in Sadr City have proclaimed support for the Falluja fighters.

The American military command said it had no information about who fired the projectiles, which General Kimmitt said appeared to have been aimed at a nearby base for American soldiers but which fell close to rows of crowded market stalls.

Furious residents held up bloodied human remains to television cameras; others shouted angrily about President Bush, the United States and Israel, and Americans and Jews. The dead included two young girls, and hospital press officers said at least three of those wounded had undergone leg amputations.

General Kimmit said the mortar was the second violent incident in Sadr City in the last day. On Friday night, he said, a military convoy was ambushed there by men firing rocket-propelled grenades. Several soldiers were wounded, he said.

In the worst of the attacks on American troops, five soldiers were killed and six wounded in a rocket attack on the sprawling military base in Taji, about 10 miles beyond the northwestern outskirts of Baghdad and a 30-minute drive from Falluja. It has been used as a base for some of the American military operations in Falluja.

In Kut, a predominantly Shiite city 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, the police chief said two more American troops had been killed when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at a convoy 25 miles south of the city.

A statement issued earlier in the day by the Marine Corps announced the death of a marine who had suffered combat injuries 10 days ago in the fighting in Anbar Province, which includes Falluja.

[The Pentagon announced Saturday that the remains of an American Army reservist missing in Iraq since an April 9 attack were recovered on Friday, Agence France-Presse reported. The reservist, Sgt. Elmer C. Krause, 40, of Greensboro, N.C., was part of a convoy that was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire west of Baghdad.

[Another American soldier, Pfc. Keith Matthew Maupin, 20, listed as missing in the same incident, was reclassified by the Pentagon on Friday as captured, making him the first soldier to be officially taken hostage since the war in Iraq began, and the second American being held by insurgents. Thomas Hamill, 43, a civilian employee of the contractor Kellogg Brown and Root, was taken hostage after the same attack, in which six other civilian employees of the company went missing.]

As coffins bearing the dead were carried out of the main Sadr City hospital, relatives wept. One woman directed her grief at President Bush and the American occupation. "This Bush, we don't want him," she told Reuters. "It wasn't like this under Saddam Hussein."

In the attack at the Taji military base, an American military spokesman said insurgents fired two rockets into the camp from the back of a truck at 5:30 a.m., striking an area of prefabricated housing units of a kind used at American bases across Iraq. Taji, one of the largest military bases in the country under Mr. Hussein, is used both as a base for American units, currently the First Cavalry Division, and as a center for training the new Iraqi Army. It has been a frequent target of insurgent strikes.

In Basra, the main city in southern Iraq, the police arrested three men as suspects in the multiple car bombings on Thursday and paraded them blindfolded before television cameras. A senior officer in the police intelligence unit, Jasim Darraji, said the men had been seized with a truck carrying more than three tons of explosives, mainly artillery shells, hidden under a cargo of sheep dung. Officials in the city revised the casualty toll in the bombings upward, to 74 dead and 160 wounded.

Britain announced Saturday that Edward Chaplin, a senior diplomat, would become ambassador to the new Iraqi government on July 1.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company