A well-organized string of suicide bombings echoed across Baghdad on Monday morning, turning the capital city of Iraq into a mess and further setting back efforts to rebuild the war-torn country.
Within less than an hour, walls collapsed, windows were shattered and blood and human flesh spattered. People had to carry the wounded and coffins using civilian vehicles to offset the sudden shortage of ambulances.
At least 34 Iraqis including eight policemen were killed and 224 others injured in the explosions, according to Ahmad Ibrahim, the deputy interior minister. Ibrahim blamed the bombings on Saddam Hussein's loyalists.
However, US Brigadier General Mark Hertling told reporters that the attacks "seem to have been the operations of foreign fighters."
"They are not something that we have seen in the former regime loyalists," he added.
A US soldier from the 1st Armored Division was also killed in one of the attacks, bringing to 113 the number of US soldiers killed by hostile fire since US President George W. Bush declared the major combat over on May. 1. Six soldiers were wounded in the same incident.
The near simultaneous bombings rocked five sites in every corner of the city -- the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the eastern side and four police stations elsewhere.
At a fifth police station in southeastern Baghdad, Iraqi police foiled a suicide bombing attempt as a Syrian national tried to drive a Land cruiser packed with 200 kg TNT through the barricade before he was gunned down and arrested.
At the ICRC base, a local resident, who identified himself only as Zaid, told Xinhua that he saw a French-made ambulance rushing toward the office building around 8:30 a.m. (0530 GMT) and going off some 30 meters from the compound, creating a two-meter deep crater on the ground.
At least 10 people, including two Iraqi ICRC staff, were killed and a dozen more injured in the blast, which torn down a front fence of the compound and smashed windows of houses hundreds of meters away.
The humanitarian workers were apparently shocked by the attack, although two suicide bombings at the UN headquarters in the past months had already forced the ICRC to cut its staff in Iraq from 100 to 30.
A spokesman of the ICRC headquarters in Geneva said on Monday that it will "reassess our conditions in Baghdad over the next few days," a sign of renewed concern over the more lethal and sophisticated attacks.
Monday's car bombings, unprecedented in Iraq, followed another attack the previous day, when unidentified assailants using an automatic launcher fired at least six rockets at the heavily fortified Rashid Hotel, where visiting US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.
Wolfowitz was unhurt but an American colonel was killed and 15 others were wounded in the attack.
In an effort to show respect for the Islamic customs and show the world a more secure Iraq, the US-led coalition Saturday lifted the night curfew imposed on Baghdad and reopened a major bridge linking the two parts of the city separated by the Tigris River.
The fresh attacks also coincided with the closing of a donors' conference in Madrid, Spain, where US officials had successfully gained pledges of a total of over 30 billion dollars in aid.
"The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that's available... the more desperate these killers become," Bush told reporters in Washington on Monday.
Despite the latest attacks and the increased frustrations over his mission in Iraq, the US president said he remained "even more determined" to work to restore peace and civility to the war-battered nation.
(Xinhua News Agency October 28, 2003)
