Deadly Day Claims 100 Iraqis
Three bombs claimed the lives of as many as 100 Iraqis Monday and left almost 200 injured.
Two nearly simultaneous bombs struck a predominantly Shiite commercial area in central Baghdad, killing at least 100 people and wounding at least 200, said Iraqi officials.
It was the deadliest day in Baghdad in two months, reports CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan. At the hospital, the cries of distraught relatives filled the air while bodies overflowed onto the ground outside. It was yet another ruthless attack on Iraq's Shiites, clearly aimed at pushing the country deeper into civil war.
Hours later, a bomb followed by a mortar attack struck a market in a predominantly Shiite town north of Baghdad, killing at least 12 people and wounding nearly 30, police said.
The bomb exploded in the early evening near the main market in Khalis, 50 miles north of the capital, and a mortar shell struck the same area about five minutes later, according to the information bureau for the volatile Diyala province. It said 12 civilians were killed and 29 were wounded.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, reported the deaths of two Marines at the end of a particularly bloody weekend for American forces in Iraq.
CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley reports that two very large bombs exploded at the Shiite market at about noon, during one of the busiest times in that market, indicating the blasts were targeting civilians.
The first blast occurred when a bomb left in a bag placed among the stalls of vendors peddling DVDs and secondhand clothes exploded in the Bab al-Sharqi area between Tayaran and Tahrir squares — one of the busiest parts of Baghdad. It was followed almost immediately by a parked car bomb just a few yards away.
A CBS News camera tapes the Baghdad skyline continuously and caught the explosions — which appear initially as two white puffs of smoke but quickly turn a more acrid black as fuel and debris burns.
The explosions left body parts strewn on the bloodstained pavement, along with DVDs and compact discs as black smoke rose into the sky. Iraqi police sealed off the area as ambulances rushed to the scene to evacuate the victims.
The wounded were taken to nearby al-Kindi Hospital where emergency personnel worked feverishly over the bloodied and badly wounded survivors.
A suicide bomber killed at least 63 people in the same region last month.
The explosions came hours after gunmen killed a female teacher as she was on her way to work at a girls' school in the mainly Sunni area of Khadra in western Baghdad, police said, adding that the teacher's driver was wounded in the drive-by shooting.
Later, two mortar shells slammed into a primary school in Dora, the dangerous south Baghdad neighborhood, killing a woman who was waiting to take her child home. Eight students were wounded, police said.
The two U.S. Marines were killed Sunday in separate attacks in Anbar Province, an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, the military said. The deaths came a day after 25 U.S. troops were killed Saturday in the third-deadliest day since the war started in March 2003 — eclipsed only by the one-day toll 37 U.S. fatalities on Jan. 26, 2005, and 28 on the third day of the U.S. invasion.
In other developments:
The names haven't been released yet, but two Army colonels were killed aboard the Black Hawk, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin. A launch tube for a shoulder-fired missile was found near where the Black Hawk went down, adds Martin. Even though they found the tube, they have not officially concluded the helicopter was shot down.
The heaviest tolls on Saturday came from the Black Hawk helicopter crash in which 12 U.S. soldiers were killed northeast of Baghdad as well as an attack on a provincial government building in the Shiite holy city of Karbala that left five U.S. troops dead.
The violence underscores the challenges faced by U.S. and Iraqi forces as they seek to rein in Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias that have made the capital and surrounding areas a battleground.
Iraq's prime minister has dropped his protection of an anti-American cleric's Shiite militia after U.S. intelligence convinced him the group was infiltrated by death squads, two officials said.
In a desperate bid to fend off an all-out American offensive, the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr last Friday ordered the 30 lawmakers and six Cabinet ministers under his control to end their nearly two-month boycott of the government. They were back at their jobs Sunday.
Al-Sadr had already ordered his militia fighters not to display their weapons. They have not, however, ceded control of the formerly mixed neighborhoods they have captured, killing Sunnis or forcing them to abandon their homes and businesses.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's turnaround on the Mahdi Army was puzzling because as late as Oct. 31, he had intervened to end a U.S. blockade of Sadr City, the northeast Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is headquarters to the militia. It is held responsible for much of the sectarian bloodshed that has turned the capital into a battle zone over the past year.
Shiite militias began taking revenge after more than two years of incessant bomb and shooting attacks by Sunni insurgents.
Sometime between then and Nov. 30, when the prime minister met President Bush, al-Maliki was convinced of the truth of American intelligence reports which contended, among other things, that his protection of al-Sadr's militia was isolating him in the Arab world and among moderates at home, the two government officials said.
"Al-Maliki realized he couldn't keep defending the Mahdi Army because of the information and evidence that the armed group was taking part in the killings, displacing people and violating the state's sovereignty," said one official. Both he and a second government official who confirmed the account refused to be identified by name because the information was confidential. Both officials are intimately aware of the prime minister's thinking.
"The Americans don't act on rumors but on accurate intelligence. There are many intelligence agencies acting on the ground, and they know what's going on," said the second official, confirming the Americans had given al-Maliki overwhelming evidence about the Mahdi Army's deep involvement in the sectarian slaughter.
Earlier this month, Bush and al-Maliki separately announced a new security drive to clamp off the sectarian violence that has riven the capital and surrounding regions.
Bush announced an additional 21,500 American soldiers would be sent to accomplish the task and al-Maliki has promised a similar number of forces, who will take the lead in the overall operation.
Iraq's Special Forces Command division has already teamed with the Americans since late last year for a series of pinpoint attacks in which at least five top Mahdi Army figures have been killed or captured.
The neighborhood-by-neighborhood sweep, expected to begin in earnest by the first of the month, will target Sunni insurgents, al Qaeda in Iraq and its allied militant bands equally with Shiite militias, both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade.
The latter is the Iranian-trained military wing of Iraq's most power Shiite political group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
The first government official said al-Maliki's message was blunt.
"He told the sheik that the activities of both the Sadrist politicians and the militia have inflamed hatred among neighboring Sunni Arab states that have been complaining bitterly to the Americans," the official said.
Sunni Muslims are the majority sect in key Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, all of which have shunned al-Maliki. Shiites, long oppressed by Iraqi's Sunni minority, and vaulted to power with the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Many of the leading Shiite figures in Iraq have deep historical ties to Iran, also a majority Shiite state, whose growing muscle in the Middle East is deeply threatening to the autocratic Sunni regimes in the region.
As the Saturday death toll among American troops was mounting, the military reported five soldiers had been killed in an attack on a security meeting in provincial government building in Karbala, south of the capital.
Thousands of pilgrims have arrived in the holy city to mark Ashoura, the festival at the start of the Islamic new year that marks the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and one of the most-revered Shiite saints.
Iraqi officials said on Sunday that the gunmen who attacked the meeting wore military uniforms and arrived in black sport utility vehicles commonly used by foreign dignitaries — an apparent attempt to impersonate American forces.