Terrorists strike U.S. ceremony in Iraq, kill 42

BAGHDAD — Terrorists struck at a U.S. ribbon-cutting ceremony in the capital with multiple bombs yesterday, killing seven adults and 35 children as they gathered around American soldiers distributing candy.

Many more children were among the scores of wounded in just one of several attacks across the country. Another attack west of Baghdad killed an American soldier.

“This is such ugliness,” said warehouse worker Ahmad Ali, 30, as he stood apart from an increasingly restless crowd rummaging through the wreckage. “This is wrong. Resistance is a must for every occupied country. But this is not resistance. This is terrorism.”

Another man, who declined to give his name, just stared at purple and pink children’s bicycles grafted onto the remnants of the exploded cars. “The children who were on these bicycles,” he said as the sentence trailed off. “Why? Why?”

U.S. officials said 10 American soldiers were wounded, two of them critically, in the explosion during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new sewer pumping station built by Americans.

“The attacks today are clearly those of a desperate enemy,” said Lt. Col. James Hutton, a 1st Cavalry Division spokesman. “There is no conceivable justification for attacking innocent Iraqi citizens who were celebrating the opening of a water pump station.”

Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman said a car bomb and an explosive device planted in the road detonated in quick succession at the site of the celebration. Other reports said another explosion took place later some distance away.

Other violence continued throughout Iraq. A U.S. soldier and several Iraqi police were killed when a car bomb detonated at a checkpoint near Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad.

The U.S. conducted morning air strikes on suspected militant safe houses in the restive western town of Fallujah, killing at least four Iraqis, according to hospital officials.

In the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, scene of a recent U.S. offensive, a car bomb aimed at security forces killed at least four and wounded 16, officials said.

An Arab news channel also aired a new video showing 10 hostages — six Iraqis, two Lebanese and two Indonesians — recently seized by a group that calls itself the Islamic Army in Iraq.

Several explosions, likely from rockets and mortars, were heard near the heavily fortified international zone in central Baghdad where U.S. officials and contractors live and work.

At Yarmouk Hospital, which bore the brunt of the dead and wounded from the pumping-station attack, some of the children cried, others refused to speak, while others shivered in shock at the day’s horror. Still others lay lifeless in the hospital’s morgue.

Ali Abdul Jabbar al-Fathri, 10, suffered shrapnel wounds on his stomach, hand and thigh. He refused to speak but his eyes darted alertly around the hospital room, filled with other battle-scarred children.

“In the beginning when we brought him to the hospital, he was able to talk,” said Hossein al-Fathri, his cousin. “But after 15 minutes, he couldn’t talk.”

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