Iraq's fledgling government stood accused of leaving its citizens defenceless yesterday after a devastating three days of suicide attacks left at least 150 people dead and more than 260 wounded, writes Michael Howard in Irbil.
In the deadliest bombing, one of at least 10 on Saturday, more than 98 people were killed and 130 were injured in the town of Musayyib, south of the capital, after a suicide bomber blew up a fuel truck near a crowded marketplace and in front of a Shia mosque.
Four more suicide bombs exploded in and around Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 22 people and wounding 19.
One in southeast Baghdad killed five members of Iraq's independent electoral commission.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed in an internet statement that the bombings were part of a campaign to take control of Baghdad. So far this month there have been more than 40 suicide attacks which have claimed 269 lives and wounded 558.
Amid the deepening security crisis in the capital, the first of a series of charges against Saddam Hussein were announced yesterday.
The judge in charge of Iraq's special tribunal said that proceedings against the former dictator would begin "within a few days", though the trial is not expected until September. Saddam and three others have been charged with the killings of Shia Muslims in the village of Dujail in 1982.
In London, the UK's ministry of defence identified the three British soldiers killed by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq on Saturday.
The MoD said the three men were from the 1st Battalion Staffordshire Regiment, which has been in Iraq since April.
The deaths brought to 92 the number of British soldiers who have died in Iraq, including 53 killed in action.
British defence secretary John Reid also confirmed that Britain wanted to begin running down its troops commitment in Iraq within the next 12 months. "If we had an open-ended presence there, and were never envisaging that the Iraqis could take control of their own country, we would be rightly criticised for long-term imperialist ambitions," Mr Reid told CNN.
The explosion in the mainly Shia town of Musayyib, on the Euphrates river, was Iraq's most lethal suicide attack since the Shia-led administration of Ibrahim al-Jaffari took office on April 28th.
Shia Arab communities in Baghdad and in the so-called "triangle of death" to the south have been a regular target of suicide bombers.
Witnesses to Saturday's bombing described the events as "nightmarish", blaming Sunni militants from nearby Latifiya.
The unprecedented scale of the attacks - 17 bombings in 72 hours in the Baghdad area alone - provoked angry reactions in Iraq's parliament.
Assembly members railed against the government for its apparent powerlessness to stem the bloodshed, and there were calls for popular militias to step in to fill the security vacuum. "The plans of the interior ministry and defence ministry to impose security have failed," said Khudair al-Kuzai, a senior assembly member.
Sheikh Salah al-Obeidi, the Najaf representative of rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said: "Iraqis are being killed as they work, as they shop, as they pray.
"I blame the interior and defence ministry which are infiltrated with Ba'athists and must do whatever the occupation forces orders."
As bulldozers cleared the wreckage of cars caught up in the blast in Musayyib yesterday, residents protested at the lack of security.
One man shouted: "The police banned trucks from entering Musayyib, yet they let in a fuel tanker. This is a crime! The police are all agents [ of the insurgency]."
In Baghdad, tense Iraqi police officers, frequently the target of suicide bombers, manned extra checkpoints.
Since the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003, there have been 400 suicide attacks.
The weekend bombings followed a thwarted triple suicide attack at a gate to Baghdad's fortified Green Zone government compound on Thursday.
A suicide car bomb on Wednesday near a US patrol killed 27 people, mostly children.