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October is fourth most lethal month in Iraq

Bomb kills 20 in crowded market filled with people shopping for Muslim holiday

BY JAMES RUPERT | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

November 1, 2005

BAGHDAD - A car bomb spewed fire and shrapnel through a crowded market in the southern city of Basra last night, killing at least 20 people. Earlier, guerrillas' bombs killed seven U.S. soldiers in the Baghdad region, and U.S. bombs killed at least a half-dozen civilians in a remote western town.

With yesterday's losses, 93 American troops were reported killed in October, making it the fourth-deadliest month in the war for them. Iraqi civilian losses go mostly uncounted.

In yesterday's mosaic of chaos, the bombing in Basra was the least routine. It shattered a market jammed with people shopping for the Muslim holiday of Eid ul-Fitr, which is to be celebrated this week with the end of fasting for the month of Ramadan.

Television footage from the city showed dazed survivors of the attack stumbling, bloodied, through debris as police and ambulance crews looked for the most severely wounded. About 20 people were injured, police said.

For most of the 31-month-old U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, the country's deep south has suffered less than central Iraq from massive bombings and direct attacks on government targets and foreign troops. That is largely because Basra and its environs are dominated by Shia Muslims who have gained unprecedented political power in Iraq with the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

But violence there has escalated among local tribes, and Basra erupted in fighting in September between British troops and Shia militias who dominate the city's police forces.

Yesterday's warfare began in Iraq's far northwest, where U.S. Marines and warplanes attacked in the pre-dawn dark, destroying two houses that U.S. forces said were believed used by members of al-Qaida.

"A senior al-Qaida cell leader was the target of the strike," Maj. Flora Lee, an Army spokeswoman in Baghdad, told the French news agency, Agence France-Presse.

Hours after the attack, an Associated Press TV crew filmed residents digging through the rubble of several concrete-block buildings.

At a home nearby, women wailed in grief over about a half-dozen bodies wrapped in blankets on the floor, including those of three children, the AP said. Doctors at the hospital in the nearby town of Qaim told news agencies that between 35 and 40 civilians overall had been killed in the raid, but such figures could not be immediately confirmed.

U.S. forces have been fighting in the largely desert terrain near the Syrian border in an effort to cut off what they say are al-Qaida infiltration routes into Iraq.

According to the U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad, four U.S. soldiers were killed yesterday when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb near Youssifiyah, just southwest of the capital. Two died in a roadside bombing near Balad, 50 miles north of here. The military announced the death of a Marine in a bomb explosion Sunday west of Baghdad. It gave no names or other information about those killed.

U.S. casualties this year are running about 9 percent higher than in 2004, in part because the insurgents' roadside bombs have become better able to puncture the armor of U.S. military vehicles. British and U.S. officials cited by news agencies say technology for the more powerful bombs appears to have come from Iran.

In Baghdad, the day's violence was its tragic norm: a mortar attack on a street near the Oil Ministry, a pair of car bombs and five drive-by shootings, according to police. At least five Iraqis were killed.