At least 64 people were killed in a bloody wave of bomb blasts in Iraq yesterday as US troops battled insurgents in the lawless western hinterland in a massive assault against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network.
At least four explosions in just an hour left trails of carnage in the northern towns of Tikrit and Hawijah and in the capital Baghdad, the deadliest attacks in a mounting wave of violence accompanying the formation of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's government earlier this month.
A first car bomb struck a busy market area in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, killing 31, mostly civilians, and wounding 66, police said.
Mangled metal scraps, sandals and destroyed market stalls littered the blood-stained ground, a reporter said. Strips of flesh splattered shop fronts near the site of the explosion.
"This is not jihad [holy war]. There was no US patrol, no Iraqi police at the time of the blast. This car bomb tore civilians to shreds," said Zeid Hamad, whose mobile telephone shop lies a few meters away from the blast site.
"Most of these people were waiting here to be hired as day laborers. They are looking for jobs, just trying to feed their families," he said.
A curfew was briefly slapped on Tikrit following the blast, and mosques blared out messages calling on residents of the small Sunni town 180km north of Baghdad to donate blood for the wounded.
In another attack, a suicide bomber wearing a belt of explosives blew himself up outside an army recruitment center in the town of Hawijah, northeast of Tikrit, killing 30 people and wounding 31, police and hospital sources said.
Many of the dead could not immediately be identified, but were believed to be young men from outlying villages who had come to join the new Iraqi army, local hospital doctor Abdallah Yussef said.
Forty-six people, mostly police recruits, were killed in a similar attack in the northern Kurdish city of Arbil on May 4.
Insurgents also detonated three car bombs in Baghdad. One targeting a police station in the restive southern district of Dura killed three people, an interior ministry official said.
Nine were wounded when a car bomb later exploded at a busy road intersection in the capital's upmarket Mansur district, the official said. Another car bomb went off in a western neighborhood of the capital but there were no immediate casualty figures.
Car bombs have been the weapon of choice for insurgents who have stepped up their attacks in recent weeks, killing nearly 400 people since the start of the month.
The past few days have also been among the deadliest in months for US troops, with 15 dead between Saturday and Monday.
Security sources said rebels kidnapped Nawaf Raja Farhan al-Mahalawi, the governor of the restive western Sunni province of Al-Anbar, where US forces are engaged in a large-scale operation to flush out insurgents.
Officials said rebels with ties to Zarqawi's network were using the governor as a bargaining chip as US forces pressed on with "Operation Matador," one of the largest post-Saddam military operations in Iraq.
The US military said its troops were encountering unsually tough resistance.
"There are reports that these people are in uniforms, in some cases are wearing protected vests, and there's some suspicion that their training exceeds that of what we have seen with other engagements further east," US Lieutenant General James Conway said in Washington.
Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who has a US$25 million prize on his head, was sighted in the area.
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