Suicide bomb kills dozens in Baghdad shopping area

BAGHDAD – A carefully orchestrated suicide bombing Thursday killed at least 55 civilians and security officials and injured 131 people out for the evening in a crowded Baghdad shopping district.

The death toll was expected to rise overnight as overstretched hospitals contended with shrapnel and burn victims, many of them women and children enjoying an evening out at the start of the Muslim weekend.

The bombings followed by three days an attack that killed 26 in Baghdad’s Bab al-Muadam district and by a month suicide attacks against Shiite pilgrims that killed nearly 100. It raised fears of an uptick in the kind of large-scale Sunni insurgent attacks on Shiite civilians that inspired sectarian reprisals and pushed the country toward civil war in 2006.

Thursday’s attack also showed the insurgents’ ability to evade elaborate security precautions meant to protect civilians.

It took place in the upscale Karada neighborhood along one of the capital’s most guarded urban corridors. Multiple security forces spread out along the main roads prevent drivers from stopping their cars and search suspicious vehicles and pedestrians.

It came at a time when the U.S. military, which had deployed 28,500 additional troops to central Baghdad in 2007, is slowly pulling those forces out of Iraq.

The buildup reduced by 60 percent the number of violent attacks in Iraq late last year, but the toll has been creeping up in recent weeks.

Thursday’s bombings appeared designed to inflict maximum casualties.

An initial explosion went off before 7 p.m. in a Dumpster near an outdoor produce market in Karada, one of the capital’s most lively areas. The blast killed three civilians and injured a dozen.

The disruption attracted a onlookers, rescuers and security officials. A suicide bomber wearing an explosives-packed belt beneath what some described as a leather jacket was in the crowd.

He set off his bomb about five minutes after the first explosion, security officials said.

Long a center of commerce and civic life, the Karada neighborhood was being hailed as a success story of the Baghdad security plan, which has reduced violence in the capital.

In recent weeks, shops had begun to open to cater to the mostly Shiite Muslim and middle-class residents of the area, one of the city’s few neighborhoods to remain vibrant well past dark.

But Karada is also frequently the target of attacks.

It is a stronghold of supporters of cleric Abdelaziz al-Hakim’s Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, the country’s dominant Shiite political party.