Suicide car bomber kills 30 in Iraq (AP) Updated: 2005-11-25 08:22
A suicide bomber blew up his car outside a hospital south of Baghdad on
Thursday while U.S. troops handed out candy and food to children, killing 30
people and wounding about 40, including four Americans.
As U.S. troops spent another Thanksgiving at war, two soldiers died in
another bombing near the capital, and the U.S. command said four American deaths
occurred Wednesday.
People mourn near
the dead bodies of their relatives, lying on beds outside the hospital in
Mahmoudiya, Iraq, Thursday, Nov. 24, 2005. A car bomb detonated outside
Mahmoudiya hospital in the center of a town south of Baghdad on Thursday,
killing 30 and wounding 35, a doctor said. [AP] |
Elsewhere, 11 Iraqis were killed and 17 injured Thursday when a car bomb
exploded near a crowded soft drink stand in Hillah, a mostly Shiite Muslim city
60 miles south of Baghdad. More than 200 people — mostly Shiites — have died
from suicide attacks and car bombs since Friday.
Amid the bloodshed, at least four insurgent groups reportedly were mulling a
government offer to talk peace — a hopeful sign for efforts to end an insurgency
that has claimed thousands of lives.
Three women and two children were among the dead in the attack outside the
hospital in Mahmoudiya, a flashpoint town 20 miles south of Baghdad in the
"triangle of death" notorious for attacks on Shiite Muslims, U.S. troops and
foreign travelers.
A civil affairs team from the U.S. Army's Task Force Baghdad was at the
hospital studying ways to upgrade the facility when the bomber struck just
outside the guarded compound, a U.S. military statement said.
Some American soldiers were distributing toys and food to children when the
attack occurred about 10:40 a.m., Iraqi police Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi said.
"There was an explosion at the gate of the hospital," sobbed one woman with
wounds on her face and legs. "My children are gone. My brother is gone."
The two U.S. soldiers killed Thursday died when their patrol was hit by a
roadside bomb southwest of the capital, a U.S. statement said.
Four more American soldiers were killed Wednesday — three in the Baghdad area
and one in Hit, 85 miles west of the capital in the Euphrates River valley, the
command said.
At least 2,104 U.S. military personnel have died since the war began in 2003,
according to an Associated Press count. The AP count is four lower than the
Defense Department's tally, which was last updated at 10 a.m. EST Wednesday.
In Baghdad, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad marked the military's third
Thanksgiving in Iraq by praising the "huge sacrifice" of American troops. Most
of the 140,000 troops got a traditional meal of turkey and the trimmings at
dining halls — or on the hoods of Humvees before going on patrol.
U.S. and Iraqi officials had been expecting a rise in violence before the
Dec. 15 election, when voters will select their first fully constitutional
parliament since the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
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