Bomb attacks on markets in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad killed at last 16 people, among 38 Iraqis killed or found dead across the country on Thursday. Seven of those died when a car bomb went off outside shops in northern Baghdad's Qahira district as noontime shoppers were gathering, said police Lt. Ali Muhsin. According to the AP, he said 27 others were injured and seven cars destroyed.
Around the same time, a suicide boomer drove his explosives-rigged vehicle into crowds gathered in Mission commercial complex for spare parts in Baghdad's downtown Karradah district, police Col. Abbas Mohammed Salman said. At least nine were killed and 27 injured in that blast, he said.
In other violence, a policeman, guard, and student died when assailants stormed the Maali primary school as classes were starting in Muqdadiyah, some 90 kilometers north of Baghdad. Three others died and 19 were injured when a roadside bomb hidden a sack went off near a crowd of street vendors in central Baghdad's Tayarn square said police Lt. Ali Muhsin.
One policeman and two civilians were killed when a roadside bomb struck an Iraqi police patrol near a market in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad.
A police colonel and his driver were killed in a shooting along a highway in eastern Baghdad, police Lt. Bilal Ali said, while gunmen in a speeding car shot dead a reputed former member of the paramilitary Saddam Fedayeen controlled by former president Saddam Hussein's late son, Udai, in Amarah, 200 miles southeast of Baghdad.
Two others were killed when a mortar bomb landed on a car in Palestine street in eastern Baghdad, said police Lt. Ali Muhsin. The bodies of at least six people were found dumped in Baghdad, police Capt. Fires Gait said.
Meanwhile, Iraqi politicians welcomed the resignation of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, blaming him for many of the country's woes. Rumsfeld's "resignation came late," said Mahmud Othman, a Kurdish MP. "He should have made it right after the scandal of Abu Ghraib in the Spring of 2004," he told the AFP.
Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlak said Rumsfeld's resignation represents an "awakening of the American conscious". "Everything that Rumsfeld and his rule did in Iraq was against ethics and against humanitarian attitudes, and it does not reflect the policies of a civilized country like the United States," he told AFP.
