Marketplace bombing kills as many as 55 near Baghdad

But as with a similar incident on Wednesday, when two explosions in another working-class Baghdad district killed at least 17 people and injured 45, it was impossible to tell whether the attack was the result of errant bombing by a coalition plane or missile, or another cause. After the Wednesday incident, blamed by the Iraqis on an American air attack, U.S. military spokesmen said they had had no planes in the area at the time and suggested the Iraqis could have caused the explosions themselves, with an errant surface-to-air missile or even by planting bombs.

Either way, incidents like the one Friday night — the worst so far in a bombing campaign that has subjected key government targets in Baghdad to a relentless, round-the-clock pounding — threaten to become yet another major problem for the Bush administration in its prosecution of the war.

With an invading force of 125,000 U.S. and British troops already hung up in southern Iraq by unexpectedly fierce resistance from Iraqi paramilitary groups, Saddam and his associates in the Baghdad leadership are certain to use any incident involving large numbers of civilian deaths, especially in Baghdad, to mobilize opinion against the war at home and abroad.

Ultimately, the Iraqi ruler appears to hope that growing opposition to the war abroad, especially in the United States and Britain, will force a radical turnaround in the allied war aims, saving him from being ousted in much the same way as he was spared by the U.S. decision to seek a cease-fire after Iraqi forces were pushed out of Kuwait in 1991.

This alone, Iraqi opposition leaders say, gives Saddam an incentive to organize incidents like the two bombing attacks that have caused high casualties among Iraqi civilians this week.

Iraqi officials react to these suggestions with fury, to the point that the dwindling group of western reporters still working in Baghdad have been cautioned that any suggestion of Iraqi complicity in civilian deaths could be a cause for expulsion. These officials say, too, that a bombing campaign that involves hitting Baghdad with dozens, and on some days, hundreds, of bombs and missiles is inherently "criminal," a word used in almost every Iraqi bulletin on the war, since even with America’s high technology, the smallest of errors can have disastrous results.

The risks inherent in the U.S. air attacks have become even clearer in the past two days, as the Pentagon has turned to strikes on a new category of targets. For the second time in 24 hours, bombs that fell shortly after dawn on Friday struck two of Baghdad’s principal telephone exchanges, after an initial strike on another exchange the previous night. The attacks left much of the Iraqi capital without telephones, and caused widespread unhappiness among ordinary Iraqis who had hoped that, contrary to the experience in 1991, the bombing would leave utilities crucial to their everyday lives intact.

Friday night, a huge bomb struck in the area beside the Tigris River where the information ministry is located, and initial reports indicated that the ministry had been substantially damaged, or even destroyed. The Pentagon had warned for weeks that Western reporters should stay away from the ministry, since it was a potential target as a telecommunications center and as a center for Iraq’s propaganda efforts. All American television networks who had used the ministry to broadcast their reports left Baghdad either before or shortly after the war began, and most other reporters, as well as Iraqi officials, had stopped visiting the ministry after mid-evening as a precaution against bombing.

The attacks on the telephone exchanges followed a strike earlier this week on Iraq’s principal radio and television headquarters, beside the information ministry. The government quickly got two of the three state-owned channels back on the air, but the message seemed clear: that the Pentagon was moving away from an initial reluctance to hit public utilities. Many Iraqis, especially those who favor a change in government here, had hoped that there would be no return to the pattern in 1991, when U.S. targets included the telephone exchanges, power plants, water-pumping stations, and bridges across the Tigris. This time, the bridges have been left standing, as have the power stations and water stations.

After the marketplace explosion Friday night, there was no ambiguity in the response of Iraqis struggling to deal with the carnage. Dr. Hassan Razouki, the 50-year-old director of the Al Noor hospital in the Shula district, half a mile from the explosion, broke away from directing surgery to save the lives of some victims to tell reporters that the incident was the result of an allied bombing attack, and to suggest that it had been part of a deliberate policy by the United States and Britain to target Iraq’s population of 24-million people.