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BAGHDAD - Bombers killed 70 people, many of them young women students, at a Baghdad university today, one of the city's bloodiest days in weeks.
In all, at least 105 were killed in bombings and a shooting in the capital on a day when the United Nations said more than 34,000 Iraqi civilians died in violence last year. Four US soldiers were killed in a bomb attack in northern Iraq.
The Shi'ite prime minister blamed the latest bloodshed in Baghdad on followers of Saddam Hussein. His fellow Sunni Arabs are angry at the botched execution of two aides today, two weeks after the ousted leader was himself hanged to sectarian taunts from official observers, captured on an illicit video.
A car bomb tore through students gathered outside the Mustansiriya University in central Baghdad, most of them women waiting for vehicles to take them home. A suicide bomber then walked into a crowd at a rear entrance, killing more.
"The followers of the ousted regime have been dealt a blow and their dreams buried forever," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said in a statement. "So Saddamists and terrorists now target the world of knowledge and committed this act today against the innocent students of Mustansiriya University."
He vowed to catch the killers and see justice done.
The Education Ministry, whose employees and students have been frequent targets of what the United Nations report called Islamic extremists, issued a public appeal for blood for the 110 wounded and said the university would close until next week.
Rescue workers picked through smouldering wreckage and human remains as police pick-up trucks took away casualties.
The bombings bore the marks of Sunni Arab insurgents. Many Sunnis were outraged by the latest hanging following a trial for crimes against humanity, and saw the decapitation of Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti by the noose as an act of revenge, not the mishap the Shi'ite-led government said it was.
Mourners, most of them Sunni and angry, visited the two fresh graves in the village where Saddam himself was buried.
34,000 dead
The United Nations, in its latest two-monthly human rights report on Iraq, said data from hospitals and morgues put the total civilian death toll for 2006 at 34,452 -- 94 each day.
Comparable figures for previous years were not available but officials agree sectarian bloodshed has surged in the past year.
"Without significant progress on the rule of law, sectarian violence will continue indefinitely and eventually spiral out of control," the UN human rights chief in Iraq, Gianni Magazzeni, told a news conference, chiding Iraqi leaders for not stopping militia killers operating with and within their security forces.
Of the 6,376 civilians killed in the last two months of 2006 -- 3,462 in November and 2,914 in December compared with a high of 3,702 in October -- three out of four were killed in Baghdad. Most of those were shot, not killed by bombs. Police said they retrieved 25 such death squad victims on Tuesday alone.
Maliki's government, which branded the last UN report as grossly exaggerated, has since banned its officials from giving casualty figures and the United States, which has run Iraq for four years, declined to vouch for the UN data.
"Unfortunately it is a war," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. "The actual number, whatever it is, is too high."
Maliki and President Bush are preparing a security crackdown in Baghdad, involving Iraqi and about 20,000 American reinforcements, which is widely portrayed as a last chance to avert a civil war between Sunnis and Shi'ites that could draw in Shi'ite Iran and Arab states on opposing sides.
Leaders of the Shi'ite majority say the plan to stifle militants with extra force, lasting six months or more, must break Shi'ite militias as well as Sunni rebels. Maliki has made that pledge before but Americans critical of Bush's new troop increase say they are skeptical he can deliver this time.
However, the Shi'ite deputy speaker of parliament said the message had been understood by Maliki and others and added that they expected failure would mean an end to American support for the system that has given Shi'ites their first taste of real power in the Sunni-dominated Arab world for centuries.
"One consequence may be a collapse of government," Khaled al-Attiya told Reuters. "I think all the Shi'ite parties are now aware of how dangerous the issue is. Bush...is still supporting the political process and the government. But I don't think that if this plan doesn't work...he can continue."
Bombing at Mustansiriya University
A police source said a car bomb exploded near the main gate of the university in an area where students wait for minibuses and cars to pick them up to go home. A suicide bomber then blew himself up near a second gate to the university as people fled the first explosion.
The university official said the head of the university, Takki Moussawi, had cancelled classes for two days.
"There is no way people could sit and study. There's glass everywhere and the doors were blown out," the official said.
The United Nations said yesterday Iraqi academics were increasingly fleeing the country in the face of violence and were frequent targets across Iraq, with at least 155 education professionals killed since 2003.
"Academics have apparently been singled out for their relatively respected public status, vulnerability and views on controversial issues in a climate of deepening Islamic extremism," the latest UN rights report on Iraq said.
- REUTERS
