Bombings kill scores of pilgrims in Iraq
Karbala, Iraq — A series of co-ordinated blasts in Iraq struck major Shia Muslim shrines in Karbala and Baghdad on Tuesday as thousands of pilgrims converged on the climactic day of the sect's most important religious festival.
Scores were killed and wounded, witnesses said.
Arab television stations reported 25 dead in Karbala. About 20 people may have been killed in the Baghdad blasts, witnesses said. Stunned witnesses said the attacks were carried out by suicide bombers.
Associated Press cited the Health Minister, saying that 58 had been killed and 128 wounded. An Agence France-Presse correspondent earlier said that he had seen at least 50 bodies in Karbala alone, with doctors estimating that at least 100 had been killed. Reports from Reuters put the death toll around 75. Cable News Network said that “at least” 40 people had been killed
The Ashoura festival, which marks the 7th-century killing of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Mohammed, is the most important religious period for Shiites and draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and other Shiite communities to the Iraqi shrines.
Last month, U.S. officials released what they said was a letter by a Jordanian militant outlining a strategy of spectacular attacks on Shiites, aimed at sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war. U.S. intelligence officials have long been concerned about the possibility of militant attack on the Ashoura festival and say that they have bolstered security around Karbala and other Shiite-majority towns in the south during the pilgrimage.
But in Beirut, a spokesman for Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, blamed U.S. soldiers for the attacks, saying they were responsible for the security. Sheik Hamed Khafaf said that U.S. officials ignored repeated requests to increase security for the pilgrims.
In Karbala, 80 kilometres south of Baghdad, five large blasts went off mid-morning local time, hurling bodies in all directions and sending crowds of pilgrims fleeing in panic. Ten bodies that appeared to be dead were loaded onto wooden carts and taken away. Bodies ripped apart by the force of the blasts lay on the streets.
There were varying accounts on the cause of the Karbala blasts, where Polish troops are in charge of security. An Iraqi police spokesman said the blasts were caused by suicide attackers, wounding at least 300 people, the Polish news agency PAP reported. But Colonel Zdzislaw Gnatowski, a Polish military spokesman in Warsaw, blamed a series of mortars fired into the shrine area.
At about the same time, three explosions rocked the inside and outside of the Kazimiya shrine in Baghdad. Panicked men and women, dressed in black, fled screaming and weeping as ambulances raced to the scene.
Angry mobs hurled stones at U.S. troops who later pulled into the square outside Kazimiya in Humvees and an armoured vehicle. Crowds of enraged survivors swarmed nearby hospitals, some blaming Americans for stirring up religious tensions by launching the war, others blaming al-Qaeda or Sunni extremists.
Some witnesses at Kazimiya said the blasts were carried out by suicide bombers. The Kazimiya shrine in northern Baghdad contains the tombs of two other Shiite saints, Imam Mousa Kazem and his grandson Imam Muhammad al-Jawad.
The Karbala blasts struck near the golden-domed shrine where Imam Hussein is buried, in a neighbourhood of several pilgrimage sites. After the blasts, Shiite militiamen tried to clear the terrified crowds, firing guns into the air. Two more blasts went off about a half-hour later.
The Kazimiya blasts went off inside the shrine's ornately tiled walls and outside in a square packed with street vendors catering to pilgrims. The street outside Kazimiya was littered with picnic baskets brought by pilgrims and thousands of shoes and sandals belonging to worshippers who had been praying inside the shrine. The courtyard inside the shrine was strewn with torn limbs.
Hundreds of gunmen swarmed inside and outside the walled shrine as men wept. A U.S. helicopter hovered over the shrine. Black mourning banners traditional in Ashoura celebrations hung in tatters. Posters of prominent Shiite clerics were stained with blood.
“We were standing there [next to the mosques] when we heard an explosion. We saw flesh, arms legs, more flesh. Then the ambulance came,” said Tarar, an 18-year-old who gave only one name.
Two armed Iraqi policemen broke down in tears as they walked through the bomb site.
“How is it possible that any man let alone a Muslim man does this on the day of al-Hussein,” said Thaer al-Shimri, a member of the Shiite Al-Dawa party. “Today war has been launched on Islam.”
Iraqi militia initially tried to control the crowd in Karbala, arresting two men the crowd were trying to lynch.
In the southern city Najaf, near Karbala, police found and defused a bomb Monday hidden near the shrine of Imam Ali, the most important Shiite saint, Iraqi Police Captain Imad Hussein said. Three sticks of dynamite with a timer were stuffed inside a water pipe 30 metres from the shrine, he said, adding if it had gone off, the explosion would have injured or killed many. |
