Rodgers: Baghdad smolders after hotel blast
 |  CNN's Walter Rodgers |
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 CNN's Walter Rodgers on the reactions in Baghdad a day after a deadly hotel blast.
 A CNN analyst on how the Baghdad blast may affect the transition of power.
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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- FBI agents arrived Thursday to help in the investigation of a deadly hotel bombing in Baghdad, one in a series of attacks as the first anniversary of the Iraq war nears.
U.S.-led coalition officials blamed Wednesday's explosion on insurgent attempts to scuttle Iraq's move toward a democratic style of government. CNN's Walter Rodgers filed the following report Thursday from the scene of the blast at the Mount Lebanon Hotel.
RODGERS: Seventeen hours after that deadly explosion, the area is still scorched. And you can see smoke rising from some of the buildings.
The bodies have been cleared at this point. And because of Iraq's, and particularly Baghdad's, badly shaken infrastructure, the rescue effort was anything but efficient last night.
It took the fire trucks half an hour to get to the scene, and it took some of the Iraqi police and the steel discipline of American soldiers backing them up to try to restore order.
Initially, the Americans were not welcome here. The Iraqis were furious because of the blast. They saw their friends and loved ones buried and burned alive in these buildings behind me, and what they did was react, place blame to the nearest lighting rod they could. That was the American soldiers.
People need someone to blame after the incident last night, and the Americans were the ones who were, at least initially, blamed.
FBI forensic experts will be combing through and have been combing through the damage for clues as to who was responsible for this attack. It is believed that it was an Islamic militant group.
U.S. officials are speculating Abu Musab Zarqawi -- they think [the Jordanian-born militant] behind much of the violence here now. Also, they're speculating it might just as well have been another Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam.
... You can see what's left of the crater in the street. This is where the detonation of the car bomb actually occurred. It is filled with water now, either from fire hoses last night or from broken water mains. We're not sure [what] the source of water [is], but I can tell you if you were to jump in that puddle, you'd be over your head.
It was a very large explosion. ... And, of course, all this [was] exacerbated even more by virtue of the fact the blast was trapped between two canyons of buildings.
