Violence spiraling in Baghdad

BAGHDAD – Bombings gutted a market and destroyed at least five buildings in working-class Shiite Muslim areas of Baghdad on Tuesday, killing dozens as violence following last month’s election continued to escalate and raise fears among Iraqis that a new civil war could erupt.

The blasts left mountains of rubble, burying men, women and children. Cranes lifted jagged walls, and rescuers tossed away bricks in hopes of finding survivors.

The explosions appeared carefully planned, with unknown men renting rooms across western Baghdad, packing the rented spaces with explosives and then blowing them up Tuesday morning.

The first blasts rocked the city shortly before 9 a.m. in the adjoining Shiite districts of Shula and Shukuk. Within the next two hours, a building that was home to a restaurant and children’s arcade was dynamited in the Allawi neighborhood, a car bomb exploded, and two more buildings were blown up elsewhere in western Baghdad.

More than 50 people were killed, according to security sources and witnesses.

The attacks followed the Friday massacre of 25 Sunni Muslim men south of Baghdad and suicide car bomb attacks against three foreign missions in the capital that claimed the lives of 41 people Sunday.

Iraqis standing near the sites of the bombings expressed rage and demanded answers. Some worried that sectarian war, which convulsed Iraq in 2006 and 2007, might return.

Others blamed the warring political sides for seeking to undermine each other after the parliamentary elections produced no decisive winner. The results left Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a bitter contest with former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite whose faction won a slim plurality.

The sides are now maneuvering to see who can form a ruling coalition, and the competition has deteriorated along sectarian lines, with al-Maliki’s Shiite supporters calling Allawi the choice of Sunni Arab extremists and former members of the late Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

Since the spate of violence over the weekend, Allawi has hammered al-Maliki’s government for failing to protect the country, a move that could cause greater divisions.

“Unfortunately the government can’t stop these attacks, and I don’t know what they were doing in the past five years,” Allawi told reporters near his Baghdad headquarters as he donated blood for victims.

“Who is responsible for these explosions? They are the terrorist forces, but the government should protect the Iraqi people. Where is the protection of the Iraqi people?” he said.

Faced with the spiraling violence, U.S. officials asserted Tuesday that Iraq was not on the precipice of a return to the chaos of 2006-’07. They also urged politicians to refrain from recriminations over the violence.

In addition, they maintained that the uptick in violence would not endanger plans to draw down from the current level of 95,000 U.S. military personnel to 50,000 non-combat troops by the end of August.

Yet there was tangible concern that the country’s slow-brewing sectarian frictions could explode if the dueling political sides blamed each other for the attacks.