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BAGHDAD : Carnage has gripped Iraq after Saddam Hussein has been executed when 77 people died in bomb attacks and December became the deadliest month for American forces in more than two years.
In the hours after Saddam swung from the scaffold in the capital, a car bomb exploded in a fish market in the town of Kufa, a triple bombing ripped through a Baghdad neighbourhood and another blew up outside a children's hospital Saturday.
Although it was not clear whether the attacks were masterminded by Saddam extremists to avenge his death, the abyss of civil strife into which Iraq has sunk since the US-led invasion has cast a shadow over Shiite celebrations.
Doctor Monther al-Ithari, the health director in the Shiite province Najaf, said 31 people were killed and another 58 people wounded by the car bombing in Kufa, most of them women and children shopping ahead of the Eid al-Adha feast.
Police Colonel Ali Jrawi said that the vehicle, a Korean-made Kia, had been parked in a popular fish market when it exploded, ripping through the weekend crowd preparing for the four-day Muslim feast.
Kufa, a small town south of Baghdad near the Shiite pilgrimage centre of Najaf, is a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has an office there and whose father was killed during the Saddam regime.
A few hours later, a triple car bombing ripped through a mainly Shiite area of north Baghdad, adding at least another 37 corpses to the grim daily toll.
Three vehicles exploded in rapid succession in a well-coordinated attack on the Shiite-Sunni district of Hurriyah, unleashing chaos and carnage.
In addition to the dozens of dead, hospitals struggled to cope with the scores of wounded, which security and military sources said ran to 76 people.
Yet another car bombing, this time outside the Al-Iskan children's hospital north of Baghdad, killed at least two people and wounded eight.
Two people were killed and three wounded when a fourth car bomb exploded near a mosque in the Sunni district of Adhamiyah after nightfall, a security source said.
Daily car bomb attacks on Shiite crowds in Iraq are usually blamed on Sunni insurgent groups such as Al-Qaeda or the Islamic Army of Iraq, whose members are linked to Saddam's defunct Baath party and his armed forces.
In the northern town of Tall Afar a suicide attacker in a bomb vest killed five market shoppers and wounded six more, police Colonel Mohammed Ahmed said.
As Iraqis died in their droves, the US military confirmed that another six American troops had been killed in the days preceding the Saddam execution.
Among the dead were three marines wounded in combat in al-Anbar province, the most infamous hotbed of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq where a soldier was also killed in fighting Friday.
The latest incidents brought to 2,990 the number of US military personnel killed in the country since the March 2003 US-led invasion, according to an AFP tally based on US defence department figures.
The highest monthly death toll for American soldiers so far this year had been in October, when the fasting month of Ramadan saw a spike in violence which left 106 US soldiers dead.
Prior to that, the worst month for US combat deaths was November 2004, when the battle of Fallujah helped push the country-wide toll to 137.
- AFP /ls
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