By Ross Colvin BAGHDAD, Nov 23 (Reuters) - A wedding car decorated with ribbons and flowers was ablaze, the bloodstained street around it littered with body parts and the smell of burnt flesh hung heavy in the air. Minutes earlier a car bomb packed with an estimated 100 kg (200 lb) of explosives had sent jagged metal ripping through afternoon shoppers in the crowded market in the Baghdad Shi'ite slum of Sadr City that is home to more than 2 million people. It was one of a string of bombings in the district, a stronghold of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, that killed 160 people and wounded 257 in the space of a few minutes and brought a country ravaged by violence ever closer to civil war. "There were pools of blood on the street and I saw children lying dead," said Karim al-Rubaie, a news photographer, who had been in the market to buy a sink when the car exploded. "I went towards the site of the explosion and a second car exploded behind me, just outside Sadr's office. Everyone was running and shouting and most of the bodies were charred. Others were torn apart," he said. In one devastated street, flames and thick, black smoke poured from the twisted wrecks of cars and minibuses as people pulled out bodies and fought to put out the fires. Even for Iraqis, long used to the daily bomb and shooting attacks that terrorise neighbourhoods and have forced tens of thousands to flee their homes, it was a hellish scene. "Maliki is a son of a dog," Sadr City residents shouted as they angrily condemned Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki -- a fellow Shi'ite whose government has struggled to stem the daily bloodshed -- for his failure to protect them from such horrors. Sadr's hardline opposition to the U.S. occupation seemed to mean that for a long time Sadr City, a stronghold of the Mehdi Army militia which waged two uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004, largely escaped Sunni insurgent attacks. But the bombing of a Shi'ite mosque in Samarra in February hardened the divide between Iraq's minority Sunnis and majority Shi'ites and, amid a spate of tit-for-tat killings, the slum has witnessed major bombings in recent months. "ALL AGAINST ALL" The United Nations said in a report on Wednesday that Iraqi deaths were at an all-time high and that Baghdad was the epicentre of a surge of sectarian bloodletting that threatens to tear the country apart three years after U.S. troops invaded. "What you have is anarchy, a war of all against all with no hand strong enough to win," said Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the Queen Mary University of London. Maliki's increasingly divided national unity government, whose Kurdish, Sunni and Shi'ite leaders appealed for calm after the carnage, is chronically ineffective. The new attacks, like the destruction of the Golden Mosque at Samarra on Feb. 22, were designed to provoke a new wave of reprisals and foster more violence, Dodge aid. "It's clearly an attempt to get a Samarra-like backlash." Operation Together Forward, a major security crackdown by thousands of U.S and Iraqi troops in Baghdad launched in August, has been declared by U.S. generals to be the defining battle of the war, but violence continues to rage unabated.
