Bombings Surge as Iraqi Militants Go on Offensive [View All]

Source: NY Times

A spate of suicide and car bombings in Iraq this week is evidence that militants have begun an offensive they had threatened during the holy month of Ramadan, an American general said today.

Seven car bombs detonated around Iraq today alone, in a drumbeat of violence that began on Monday. The violence was more intensive than has been typical, at least in recent weeks, although American officials continue to maintain that the increased troop levels this year are still proving effective in tamping down violence.

“We have seen an upturn in levels of violence in the last few days,” Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a spokesman for the American military, said at a news conference in the Green Zone in Baghdad. “We know this is a specific period of time when the extremists, in the past, and we know this year, will try to increase the levels of violence during the period of Ramadan,” he said.

In the deadliest attack today, a double car bombing killed 32 people and wounded many more on a busy shopping street in the mixed Sunni and Shiite neighborhood of Bayaar in western Baghdad. The bombs were timed to kill people shopping for groceries before the evening Iftar feast, the meal to break the daily fast of Ramadan.

They detonated about a minute apart; after the first bomb exploded, crowds fleeing the scene ran into the vicinity of the second bomb, a police official said. The tally of dead in those explosions was a preliminary count soon after the blast by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, an official there said. Sunni extremist groups have warned online that Ramadan would be particularly violent, repeating a pattern that has been seen in successive years since the American-led invasion in 2003.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/world/middleeast/26cnd-iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin