Car bombs kill 41, wound nearly 150 in Iraq
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-06-18 11:28

Car bombers targeted Iraq's security services Thursday, blasting Iraqis hoping to join the military in Baghdad and a civil defense post north of the capital, killing 41 people and wounding nearly 150.

Iraqis remove the dead from the scene of an explosion in central Baghdad, Iraq Thursday June 17, 2004. At least 21 people were killed and 69 wounded by a car bomb outside a recruiting station for Iraqi security forces, police said. [AP]

Most of the victims were poor Iraqis desperate to take dangerous jobs in the Iraqi security forces because of a lack of alternatives in a country with up to 45 percent unemployment. They took their chances at the recruitment center in Baghdad even though a car bombing killed 47 people there in February.

"I have been coming for three weeks and they decided to interview us today," Abdul Wahid Shadhan, 32, said as he lay in a hospital bed coughing up blood. "I heard a big explosion, I lost sight of everything and then I found myself in the hospital."

Shadhan said he had been out of work since the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army last year. "I was obliged to work as a porter to feed my seven children," he told The Associated Press.

Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem al-Shalan promised a "house-to-house" search for anybody involved in planning the suicide attack.

"We will cut off the hands of those people, we will slit their throats if it is necessary to do so," he told reporters. "For those people who want to join the new Iraqi army, we will protect them and we will find them a safe location so they can submit their applications."

Thursday's attack near the recruitment center - the deadliest single blast since a car bombing at the same base in February - came amid a surge of violence targeting American troops and their Iraqi allies ahead of the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.

The attacks are apparently designed to shake confidence in Iraqi security forces, seen by some in the region as beholden to the Americans.

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