Coordinated Attacks Bombard Iraq, Killing Dozens

BAGHDAD — Insurgents unleashed a barrage of coordinated car bombings and small-arms attacks across Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 40 people in what Iraqi officials called a “frantic race” to shatter people’s faith in the government’s strained grip on security.

The worst of the violence was concentrated here in Iraq’s capital, where more than two dozen people were killed in explosions and where fusillades of gunfire transformed the morning commute into a landscape of carnage.

Although civilians suffered the worst casualties, most of the attacks were aimed at police officers, security convoys and other symbols of government authority. Bombs exploded outside a police station, a court, a political office and a local council building.

Several assailants targeted the roadside checkpoints where police officers and soldiers check drivers’ identification cards and sometimes search cars. The ubiquitous checkpoints, decorated by security forces with fabric flowers and emblems of religious (usually Shiite) pride, are an almost daily focus of violence.

More than a hundred people across the country were wounded in the attacks.

As workers swept up glass at one bomb site in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad, wails of grief rose up from one family’s home a block away as they mourned a 16-year-old boy who loved to play soccer along the east bank of the Tigris River. The teenager, Sajad Montasir, was killed as he waited for a minibus to take him to school.

“He just had his breakfast, took his books and left walking,” said his older brother, Mustafa. “I heard the explosion, I ran into the street and I found his shoe.”

A few hours after the attacks in the neighborhood, taxis sat crumpled and deserted in the streets, blood streaking their yellow doors. Shop owners whose windows have been repeatedly blown out looked on wearily at the heaps of glass. Residents near the scene of an explosion weeded their gardens of fragments of an exploded car. For some, it was the fourth or fifth time their homes had been ravaged by a morning bombing.

“Iraq will be like this for 10 or 15 years,” said Abdul Razaq al-Zaidi, 52, whose head was cut by flying glass. “We are used to it. This is a part of our lives.”

Security forces blocked off roads throughout Baghdad, and the wounded were rushed to nearby hospitals. In streets choked with smoke and littered with burned-out wreckage, witnesses described scenes of panic and chaos with “fire everywhere,” according to one.

Several of the explosions raked through predominately Shiite towns and neighborhoods, a strong suggestion that the attacks were an attempt by Sunni insurgent groups to inflame divisions between Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority and its Sunni minority.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility, but the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which controls the country’s police forces, blamed Al Qaeda in Iraq, one of the Sunni insurgent groups, using the term “frantic race” against the government in a statement. The almost meticulously coordinated nature of the blasts, which happened within a span of two hours in Baghdad, were similar to previous Qaeda attacks.

The Interior Ministry, in a statement, called the bloodshed a “message sent by Al Qaeda to their supporters stating that they are still active in Iraq and have the ability to conduct blasts in Baghdad, provinces, big and small districts.”

The day’s attacks, along with a recent suicide car bombing outside Baghdad’s police academy, punctured a few weeks of relative calm in the country in which violence had dwindled to near its lowest levels since the United States invasion in 2003.

Assaults against Iraqi civilians and government officials had swelled in late December and January in the wake of the American troop withdrawal, as the country was gripped by a political crisis rooted in imbalances of power and festering conflicts between Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and his largely Sunni and secular political opposition.

The crisis eased somewhat as opposition politicians ended their boycott of Parliament and the cabinet. But Iraq’s leaders have not answered deeper questions of how to share power, deliver services and divide control of disputed territories and oil resources, leaving plenty of room for insurgents to attempt to exploit a persistent sense of instability and dissatisfaction with the government.

The attacks elsewhere in the country included some in Salahuddin Province, immediately north of the capital, where four people were killed. Car bombs struck at a local court, a Shiite enclave within the heavily Sunni Muslim province, a local police station and the local headquarters of a Kurdish political party.

Security officials in the province set up temporary checkpoints and imposed a curfew in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown.

Three explosions also ripped through Babel Province, a heavily Shiite area south of Baghdad, killing two people and wounding scores more. One of the attacks was aimed at police officers, while civilians bore the brunt of the other explosions, including 30 children who suffered mostly minor wounds when the concussive force of a nearby car bomb sent shards of glass whipping through their school.