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Length: 3:57
HALA GORANI: Well, taking you to Iraq, police there
say and tell CNN that two explosions have ripped
through a crowded market in the Shiite city of Hilla.
Police say that at least now 45 people have been
killed and 150 others injured. The blast occurred in
a central market around 6 p.m. local time. Hilla is a
located about 100 kilometers south of the capital,
Baghdad.
JIM CLANCY: All right. Let's get an update live from
Baghdad. And our own Michael Ware is standing about
there and following developments very closely on
this.
Michael, what's the latest you can tell us about what
happened there?
MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim, what we
understand, as Hala said, at about 6 p.m. in central
Hilla, this town just south of the capital, in a
crowded market, as people would have been buying
their goods for the evening meal, two suicide bombers
entered with explosives attached to their chest,
according to local police. Now, they say that a
police officer noticed at least one of these men and
approached him.
Upon confrontation, they say, the man then detonated
himself, wounded and killing a number of people.
Shortly thereafter, within close vicinity, the second
suicide bomber, the officials say, detonated himself.
Like we've been saying, as it stands right now, we
believe that there are as many as 45 dead and up to
150 wounded. And the people that we're talking to
down there say that those numbers, unfortunately, are
expected to rise.
CLANCY: Michael, I want to talk to you a little bit
about an incident that happened on Sunday. A major
battle developing. Right at the start, it was said --
the reports coming out of the Iraqi, the official
version from the Iraqi government -- was that this
was a cult who was bent on attacking some of the Shia
religious leaders in the city of Najaf. But now
there's some cell phone video that is coming out,
mobile phone video showing piles of bodies on the
ground. Iraq's government spokesperson maintaining
that all of this was as a result of the violent
messianic cult.
What do we really know? Who's telling the truth here?
WARE: Well, it's very hard to say, Jim. I mean, as
you're well aware, I mean, the fog of war shrouds
everything. Not just here, but in most conflicts.
What we do know for a fact is that a tremendous
engagement took place on Sunday just outside Najaf.
It certainly appears that there was quite a fight
here.
Now, what the government is saying is that this
essentially was a messianic cult, an apocalyptic
cult. Just when this war couldn't get any more
bizarre, we now start to see the emergence of such
things, according to the Iraqi government.
The U.S. military is less clear. Officers I've just
been speaking to said the jury is still out on just
who these people were.
A military spokesman said that according to military
intelligence, we're talking about a Shia splinter
group. He wouldn't explain exactly what that meant.
However, what did happen is that Iraqi forces engaged
this group north of the city. The government says
they had plans to kill the Shia leadership in that
city and allow their leader to take over.
Either way, once the engagement began, other Iraqi
units were called in and they had American advisers.
Those American advisers then called in American air
cover, two Apache helicopters. One of them which went
down.
As the fight continued throughout the night, F-16s
and A-10 anti-tank aircraft and an AC-130 gunship,
we're told, were also brought in. By the end of it,
according to the U.S. military, there's 250 dead on
the side of the faction that was fighting, the
so-called sect, and they say that so far there's at
least 400 prisoners. But at the end of the day,
there's other accounts from locals on the ground,
local media. We really don't know what went on --
Jim.
CLANCY: All right. Well, maybe when they get a chance
to talk to some of the people who have been captured,
they can sort some of this story out.
Michael Ware, as always, thanks to you, for your
reporting there from Baghdad -- Hala.