Unidentified bodies in bags or under pieces of cardboard lay on the ground in a Balad hospital courtyard yesterday. Weeping women went from body to body searching for loved ones. The blasts reduced nearly an entire block in the market district to a giant mound of twisted metal and bricks.
''Why does such a thing happen to us? We ask the government and Arab countries to help us," cried Mohammed Mahdi Jassim, a Balad resident.
Both attacks seemed staged to kill or maim as many civilians as possible, tearing through busy markets and commercial streets. At least 10 people were killed in Hillah and 102 in Balad. At least 22 of those killed both days were women and children.
Insurgents have vowed to derail the Oct. 15 referendum, opposed by Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, and the recent surge of violence has killed at least 200 people, including 13 US service members, in the past five days.
The Sunni-led Al Qaeda in Iraq, the most feared insurgent group, has declared ''all-out war" on Shi'ites, and since a Shi'ite-majority government took power April 28, suicide bombers have killed at least 1,345 people, according to an Associated Press count.
Mohammed Kadhim, 25, a Shi'ite shopkeeper in the town of Dujail, said he would not allow his family to vote on the constitution. ''I'm responsible for their safety after what happened in Balad, and what is happening in the whole country with the occupation forces and the government."
Hussein Ali, a 67-year-old Shi'ite in Balad, also said he would stay away from the polls. ''I will not take part in this game that kills Iraqis," he said.
The sharpening Sunni-Shi'ite divide is a blow to hopes that the constitution would unite Iraqis and bring stability, allowing the US military to begin pulling out troops. Withdrawals projected for next spring may have to be pushed back.
The constitution ''didn't come out as the national compact that we thought it was going to be," the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, told a Pentagon news conference yesterday. ''And that caused the situation to change a little bit." He said he still believed some troop reductions were possible in 2006.
