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Four large bombs exploded in mostly Shi'ite areas of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least 160 people and wounding scores as violence climbed toward levels seen before the US-Iraqi campaign to pacify the capital began two months ago.

In the deadliest of the attacks, a parked car bomb detonated in a crowd of workers at the Sadriyah market in central Baghdad, killing at least 112 people and wounding 115, said Raad Muhsin, an official at Al-Kindi Hospital where the victims were taken.

Among the dead were several construction workers who had been rebuilding the mostly Shi'ite marketplace after a bombing destroyed many shops and killed 137 people there in February, a police official said.

The laborers typically finish work around 4 PM each day. One of those wounded, 28-year-old Salih Mustafa, said he was waiting for a minibus to head home when the blast went off at 4:05 PM.

"I rushed with others to give a hand and help the victims," he said. "I saw three bodies in a wooden cart, and civilian cars were helping to transfer the victims. It was really a horrible scene."

The market is situated on a side street lined with shops and vendors selling produce, meat and other staples. It is also about 500 meters from a Sunni shrine.

About an hour earlier, a suicide car bomber crashed into an Iraqi police checkpoint at an entrance to Sadr City, the capital's biggest Shi'ite Muslim neighborhood and a stronghold of the militia led by radical anti-US cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr.

The explosion killed at least 33 people, including five Iraqi security officers, and wounded 45, police and hospital officials said.

Black smoke billowed from a jumble of at least eight incinerated vehicles that were in a jam of cars stopped at the checkpoint. Bystanders scrambled over twisted metal to drag victims from the smoldering wreckage as Iraqi guards staggered around stunned.

Earlier, a parked car exploded near a private hospital in the central neighborhood of Karradah, killing 11 people and wounding 13, police said. The blast damaged the Abdul-Majid hospital and other nearby buildings.

The fourth explosion was from a bomb left on a minibus in the central Rusafi area, killing four people and wounding six others, police said.

In another development, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Wednesday that Iraq plans to take security control of the whole country from foreign forces by the year end.
 
But he said there was no easy way to end the raging sectarian violence.

Anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr withdrew his six ministers from Maliki's cabinet on Monday to press for a pull-out timetable for the 146,000 US troops in Iraq.

In a speech delivered on his behalf at a ceremony marking the handover of southern Maysan province from British to Iraqi control, Maliki said three provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region would be next, followed by Kerbala and Wasit provinces.

"Then it will be province by province until we achieve (this transfer) before the end of the year," Maliki said in the speech delivered by National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie.

Rubaie said this could happen even sooner.

"We are working very hard to get all provinces to have control and transfer security responsibilities... well before Christmas," he told reporters in English after the ceremony.

Britain has 7,000 troops stationed in Iraq's Shi'ite south. It pulled its troops out of the Maysan capital Amara last year and repositioned them along the Iranian border, a move greeted as a victory by Sadr's Mehdi Army a militia regarded by Washington as the greatest threat to peace in Iraq.

Maysan is the fourth of Iraq's 18 provinces to be handed to Iraqi security forces, joining Muthanna, Najaf and Dhi Qar, all predominantly Shi'ite and relatively calm regions in the south.

Maliki says Iraq's security forces will only take back control from foreign forces when ready, but he urged patience.

(China Daily via agencies April 19, 2007)