35 small bodies add up to horror: Baghdad -- Some of the children cry. Some refuse to speak, shivering in shock at the day's horror. Others lie lifeless in the morgue at Yarmouk Hospital.
An orderly pushes a bed carrying a small dead boy, his head and torso wrapped in a clean white sheet, his lifeless hand resting on his heart.
Abdul-Rahman al-Jabouri, 11, shrieks in pain, his body clothed only in bandages and hung with intravenous tubes.
He had approached U.S. soldiers at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a restored sewage pump. The soldiers were giving out candy and jostling playfully with children enjoying their last fling before school begins on Saturday.
Then a bomb ripped into his torso and limbs.
At least 35 children died and dozens more were injured Thursday when two car bombs devastated the street celebration in Baghdad's western al-Amel neighborhood. More children died in the bombings than in any insurgent attack since the start of the Iraq conflict.
At least seven adults also died in the double bombing, the worst of the day's spate of savage attacks that killed at least 51 people and wounded 230 nationwide. One U.S. soldier was among the dead.
The wounded children were rushed to Yarmouk Hospital, where doctors were overwhelmed by the carnage as relatives fell into grief and rage. Some blamed U.S. forces.
"The Americans knew this was going to happen," said Hassan Salman al- Jabouri, a relative of Abdul-Rahman. "That's why they brought so many children there."
Ali al-Fathri, 10, refused to speak, but his brown eyes darted alertly around the hospital room filled with other bomb-scarred children. He was heading to the store on an errand for his family when the explosions hit, sending shrapnel flying into his stomach, hand and thigh, according to his cousin, Hossein al-Fathri.
"In the beginning, when we brought him to the hospital, he was able to talk," the cousin said. "But after 15 minutes he couldn't talk."
Hassan al-Makhsousi, 13, was stoic and, with his father at his side, mustered up the strength to tell his story.
He was going shopping, he said, getting a Pepsi and some chocolates. He noticed the U.S. soldiers joking with the neighborhood kids, kicking around a soccer ball. Then came the explosions. The first bomb struck him in the shoulder and the leg, and he was able to limp to safety. He guessed that 10 of his friends were killed. They were neighborhood kids, he said, his soccer pals and his best friend, Ahmad, with whom he was about to start the seventh grade.
"I cannot feel anything now," Hassan said.
In the nearby morgue, the hand of a little girl, her light brown hair caked in blood, protruded from under a bloodied white blanket.
Mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles wandered the hospital corridors. They wept. They chainsmoked cheap cigarettes.
A man, told his son has just died, cried uncontrollably, shoulders heaving. A woman whose grandson was wounded tried to console him. "You're scaring the children," she told him. Other relatives escorted him away.
More than 140 Iraqis, an unspecified number of them children, were wounded in the attack, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry.
Burnt pieces of metal and bits of human flesh littered the scene hours after the bombings; heavily armed Kiowa surveillance helicopters circled overhead.
Local residents and U.S. soldiers of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division had gathered to celebrate the inauguration of a new sewage pump, part of a $40 million effort to rebuild the sewer system in the city's al-Rashid district, said a military official. In most places, such an event might pass with routine comment. In Baghdad, where raw waste still flows through some neighborhoods, it was a time to celebrate.
The U.S. Army and the Iraqi national guard had rented chairs and invited the neighborhood. The explosions came as troops were pulling out to head back to their base. U.S. and Iraqi reinforcements moved in fast and established a perimeter and attempted to seal off the area with two tanks.
Ten American soldiers were injured in the attack; the newly refurbished sewage plant escaped unscathed.
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