Car Bomb Kills 51 In Iraq

The Doha-based broadcast said hospitals cannot cope with the large number of causalities.

Baquba, a mixed Sunni and Shiite town, has experienced frequent car-bombings and attacks over the past year.

Many of those have targeted Iraqi policemen, who some Iraqi fighters regard as collaborators with US and foreign occupation troops in the country.

The fresh bombing comes few days ahead of the country’s major national conference, scheduled for Saturday, July31 .

Organizer Fouad Massoum told Reuters Tuesday, July27 , the conference, due to be attended by about1 , 000people, would take place in Baghdad, even though the United Nations had requested a delay.

The United Nations, which first proposed the conference in May and said it should be held before the end of July, had pushed in the past week for it to be postponed for several weeks in view of the deteriorating security situation.

The conference is supposed to bring together representatives from all walks of Iraqi life — religious, ethnic, political and otherwise — to select a100 -member National Council to act as a check on Iraq’s interim government until elections in January.

The latest car bomb in Iraq killed three Iraqis, including a child, on Monday, July26 , in the northern city of Mosul.

On July14 , a car bomb killed at least 10 people near the heavily-guarded Green Zone in Baghdad.

Iraqi scholars had ruled such indiscriminate attacks were strictly prohibited in Islam, stressing, in the meantime, the legitimacy of the unabated resistance operations against the US-led occupation troops.