- BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) --
A huge car bomb exploded outside the main U.S. headquarters in Baghdad
on Sunday morning, killing at least 17 people and wounding 25 as they waited
to enter the base, officials said.
-
- Reuters Television footage showed injured people lying
near the main gate to the high-security "Green Zone," the U.S.
civilian and military base in the Iraqi capital. Cars were on fire in the
background.
-
- "It was a car bomb a few meters outside the Green
Zone gate. There are several people killed," an Iraqi police spokesman
said.
-
- A military spokeswoman told Reuters 17 people were dead
and an official at the U.S.-led civil administration said 25 people were
wounded.
-
- A U.S. soldier on the spot said almost all the victims
appeared to be Iraqi civilians, mostly those who work in the base and were
waiting at the gate to be searched before entering. One U.S. soldier was
believed injured, he said.
-
- Sunday is a working day in Iraq and the bomb went off
just after 8 a.m. (midnight EST), when many people would have been on their
way to office.
-
- One man could be seen lying on the ground with only a
slight twitch in his knees showing he was alive. Another was slumped on
the kerb.
-
- U.S. Army armored vehicles came out onto the street and
the wounded were ferried away in ambulances.
-
- At the nearby Yarmouk Hospital, over a dozen people were
admitted with bomb blast injuries. At least one man was taken in on a stretcher,
his body covered in blood and a transfusion bottle held above by an attendant.
-
- "I saw a car, I really don't know what happened,"
said Raqad Iyas Ibrahim, a woman sitting on a bed in the hospital with
her head bandaged and her face caked with blood.
-
- "I saw windows smashing and then I fell," she
said before breaking down into sobs."
-
- Insurgents resisting the U.S. occupation regularly attack
the U.S. military and those they see as cooperating with the occupiers.
-
- The last major attack in the capital was a car bomb which
went off outside a major city restaurant on New Year's Eve, killing at
least eight people and wounding 30.
-
- - Reporting by Andrew Marshall, Fiona O'Brien and Nadim
Ladki
-
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