120 die in blast in Iraq

HILLAH, Iraq – Weeping and beating their chests, hundreds of people inspected corpses at a hospital morgue in Hillah today, trying to identify friends and family members who died in a suicide bombing that killed at least 120 people, the single deadliest attack of its kind since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Hospital official Ali Hassoun said at least five people had succumbed to wounds overnight, raising the death toll to 120. More than 130 others were wounded in the blast, which targeted mostly Shiite police and national guard recruits lined up for physical exams at a medical clinic.

Distraught relatives at the morgue placed the dead into coffins and loaded them onto pickup trucks, taking them to city mosques and homes, where the bodies will be washed before burial, a Muslim tradition in Iraq.

Many of the corpses, charred or dismembered, were unrecognizable.

Funeral processions were expected to be held in Hillah and many of the dead were to be taken to the holy Shiite city of Najaf for burial later today.

Monday’s bombing presented the boldest challenge yet to Iraq’s efforts to build a security force that can take over for the Americans.

The explosion in Hillah, a largely Shiite Muslim town about 60 miles south of Baghdad, was so powerful that the only thing remaining of the bomber’s car was the twisted engine block.

Some of the victims were shoppers or vendors from a nearby outdoor street market selling produce, sandwiches and other food. But most were recruits waiting outside the clinic.

The bombing comes at a time when the Sunni Arab insurgency is trying to disrupt the formation of a new government set to be led by majority Shiites for the first time in modern history. Iraqi forces are eventually supposed to take over responsibility for security – the key to Washington’s exit strategy – but they remain under-equipped, ill-prepared to fight insurgents and often make easy targets.

The Shiites have refrained from striking back – mostly at the behest of their most revered leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is widely credited with bringing them this far. Al-Sistani wants nothing to impede the Shiites from gaining the political power they have craved in Iraq, and will not allow them to engage in a sectarian war.

It’s not that they lack the firepower – nominally disbanded Shiite militias could easily field thousands of tough and effective fighters that could deal a crushing blow to the insurgency.

“We sacrificed a lot of blood, we have to be patient and not drift into a civil war as Ayatollah al-Sistani has said,” said Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer, a senior cleric and member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic revolution in Iraq.

Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the United Iraqi Alliance, recently hinted that the Shiites were waiting to take power before dealing with the insurgency. He indicated that a first step would be to identify and purge the security services of any insurgency sympathizers.

“We must depend on the sons of the Iraqi people who believe in the new Iraq, and not on those bad elements that infiltrated the security circles and turned into a problem,” al-Hakim told the Associated Press on Sunday. “We can’t solve the security issue unless we reconsider the internal structure, to spot those bad elements.”

The main Shiite clergy-backed United Iraqi Alliance is seeking the support of other parties to achieve the two-thirds majority required for forming Iraq’s new government. The alliance won 140 of the 275 seats in the National Assembly in the Jan. 30 elections. The main Kurdish alliance won 75 seats. Sunnis – who make up about 20 percent of the population – largely stayed away from the vote.

Finding a way to end the largely Sunni insurgency and soothe fears of Sunnis who have dominated the Iraqi political sphere for centuries will be the most crucial and complex task for the new government.

There are no official figures available, but an AP count found that 234 people were killed and 429 people were injured in at least 55 incidents from Jan. 1 until election day. Casualties rose in February, which saw at least 38 incidents that resulted in at least 311 deaths and 433 injuries.

Although Monday’s bombing did not appear to be an explicit attack against Shiites, most of the victims were Shiites.

In fact, insurgents have stepped up assaults against predominantly Shiite targets in recent weeks, most notably a series of suicide bombings and other attacks that left nearly 100 people dead over the two-day Ashoura commemoration that began on Feb. 18.

Nevertheless, Monday’s blast was the culmination of hundreds of mass-casualty car bombings that began in earnest with the Aug. 7, 2003, explosion at the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, an attack that killed 19 people.

The second deadliest attack since Saddam fell took place on Aug. 29, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside a mosque in Najaf, killing more than 85 people.