Baghdad: Serial blasts in Shorja markets, 71dead

Baghdad, Feb 13: Markets should be the lifeblood of a city. In Baghdad, they are killing fields.

Simultaneous blasts that killed 71 people on Monday at the Shorja market, Baghdad's oldest, were just the latest in a wave of attacks at markets selling everything from clothes to pets.

''They've targeted us so many times. I don't know what the government is waiting for?'' said Naseer Jalil, sitting in his store that sells sewing accessories in Shorja as Iraqi soldiers and police guarded the area outside.

Jalil's store was spared the fireball that engulfed other shops and an eight-storey warehouse. Yesterday, people looking for bodies combed through the burnt-out building.

Providing protection to markets will be one of the biggest challenges for Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki under a US-backed offensive against militants that began last week.

The operation in Baghdad, which is expected to take months to peak, is seen as a final attempt to prevent all-out civil war between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.

Insurgents have hit big markets like the Shorja wholesale centre repeatedly. Smaller markets have not been spared either.

Markets are a favourite target. They are often outdoors, accessible and usually packed with shoppers seeking cheap goods that they cannot afford elsewhere as Iraq's economy suffocates from unrelenting violence.

''Shorja has become a place of terror and death,'' said Ahmed Sameer, a labourer.

A US military spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver, said the Baghdad security plan would take the city's markets into account.

''Planners are looking for ways right now to make the markets, and the citizens of Baghdad who use them, safer,'' Garver said, declining to discuss specifics.

Changing Habits

The market bombings have forced Iraqis to change their habits. Even before the latest attacks, store owners said they thought twice before going to Shorja, a supplier for countless small shops scattered across Baghdad and central Baghdad.

Some merchants said their incomes had been cut in half in the past year, after sectarian violence surged following the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra last February.

Abu Ammar, 63, who owns a food supermarket in the Karrada commercial district, said he relied more and more on delivery drivers to pick up goods from Shorja.

''Our ambitions as traders have died. Returning home safe and sound is the most important thing now,'' Abu Ammar said.

Shoppers have the same fears.

Kawther Abdul-Ameer had just bought a baby carrier for her newborn niece from a market vendor in Baghdad on Sunday. Seconds later as she walked away, a taxi parked nearby exploded, sending shrapnel hissing past her head. One man was killed.

''I'm beginning to become afraid of commercial areas, but I will go to the same place if I really need something,'' said Abdul-Ameer, a 33-year-old Iraqi reporter who occasionally works for Reuters.

Among recent attacks on markets has been the single deadliest bombing since the 2003 war, when a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with a tonne of explosives into the Sadriya market on February 3, killing 135 people.

Markets are not only targets for bombings. Kdnappings have taken place in shops, restaurants and electronics businesses.

Saad Luwis, 41, a small store owner in Karrada, was not hopeful the security crackdown would make a difference.

''I would feel optimistic if everybody was united, but if everybody sticks to these sectarian principles, then I feel the opposite,'' he said.

Reuters