Car bomb kills six in Baghdad
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-05-24 18:26

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A car bomb exploded Tuesday near a Baghdad junior high school for girls, killing six people, officials said, a day after 49 Iraqis died in a string of explosions, suicide attacks and drive-by shootings.

Tuesday's blast occurred near eastern Baghdad's well-known Withaq Square, a Christian neighborhood, destroying at least three cars and damaging several buildings.

The U.S. military announced that a two-day operation involving more than 2,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, their largest-ever joint campaign in the Baghdad area, had rounded up 428 suspected insurgents.

But insurgents continued to wreak havoc in the Iraqi capital despite the crackdown in the Abu Ghraib area targeting militants thought responsible for multiple attacks on the U.S.-detention facility there and the road linking downtown to the international airport.

Residents called police about a suspicious-looking car parked opposite the Dijlah Junior High School for Girls in Alwiyah. As bomb disposal experts approached the vehicle, it exploded and killed six bystanders, said police Capt. Husham Ismael.

Three civilians and one policeman were also injured; none of the school's students were believed to be among the casualties.

"May God seek revenge for those who were killed or injured," an elderly woman screamed outside a hospital were casualties were being brought. "We hope that such killers be killed or perished as they kill our youth. Those killers are against homeland, against Islam."

At least 615 people, including 49 U.S. troops, have been killed since April 28, when Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his new Shiite-dominated government. Washington hopes his government will eventually train police and an army capable of securing Iraq, allowing the withdrawal of coalition troops.

Iraq's National Assembly convened Tuesday and is expected to announce the head of a committee charged with drafting Iraq's new constitution, which must be drawn up by mid-August and put to a referendum by October.

Shiite Muslim cleric Hummam Hammoudi, an aide to the leader of Iraq's largest Shiite Arab party, will most likely head the committee, three lawmakers said Monday.

Amid a wave of sectarian violence, there have been calls for greater Sunni participation in drafting the constitution. Just 17 Sunni Arabs are in the assembly, or parliament, following a decision by many Sunni members not to participate in Jan. 30 elections, either by choice or fear of insurgent reprisals.

At least 20 people were killed in Monday's deadliest attack when two car bombs exploded near the home of Hassan Baktash, a Shiite Muslim with close ties to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, in Tal Afar, 50 miles west of the northern city of Mosul, officials said.

In Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber blew himself up near a Shiite mosque, killing at least 10 people and wounding 30, many of them children, police said.

Sunni Muslims opposed to Iraq's Shiite-dominated government are thought to provide the backbone of the insurgency, and some Sunni extremists are attacking Shiite targets in an effort to provoke a sectarian war.

Eight people were killed and over 80 injured when a car bomb exploded Monday outside a Baghdad restaurant popular with police.

A suicide bomber killed five Iraqis and injured 13 in an attack outside a municipal council office in Tuz Khormato, south of the northern city of Kirkuk, police said.