Bombs, Guns Target Shiite Muslims
A series of coordinated blasts struck near major Shiite Muslim shrines in Baghdad and Karbala in Iraq Tuesday as thousands of pilgrims converged for the final day of a major religious festival. Witnesses say scores were killed and wounded.
Minutes later in Quetta, Pakistan, Shiite worshippers were again the target as armed men opened fire on a religious procession, killing at least 12 people and wounding at least 33 others.
Gunshots continued to ring out in the city nearly an hour after the killings, said Khyzar Hayyat, a local police official.
"The situation is very bad," he said. "I can hear gunshots."
The attack reopens wounds for Quetta, which last July was the site of one of the deadliest acts of sectarian violence in years in Pakistan. Men with machine guns and grenades stormed a Shiite Muslim mosque, killing 50 people praying inside.
Tuesday's attacks in Iraq and Pakistan came at the height of the Ashoura festival, which commemorates the beheading of Imam Hussein - grandson of the prophet Mohammed - by his enemies.
Ashoura is the most important religious period in Shiite Islam and draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and other Shiite communities to the Iraqi shrines.
In Iraq, where Shiite and Sunni Muslims have been rivals for centuries, shock continues to spread at Tuesday's apparently coordinated attacks on Shiite Muslims.
In Baghdad, a U.S. military spokesman said blasts Tuesday at a Shiite shrine there were caused by four mortar rounds, killing at least 19 people and wounding dozens of others.
The mortars were fired from an unknown location, hitting in and around the Kazimiya shrine in the northern part of the capital, Cpl. Craig Stowell said. In the chaos afterward, an Iraqi policeman was shot in the head and killed by small arms fire, he said.
Officials at a Baghdad hospital said they had 18 dead from the Kazimiya blast. An unknown number of other victims were believed taken to other hospitals.
In Karbala, at least 31 people are dead and at least another 100 were injured in twin explosions at the city's holiest Shiite shrines.
In Karbala, an Associated Press reporter saw ten bodies that appeared to be dead being loaded onto wooden carts and taken away. Many others were injured. Bodies ripped apart by the force of the blasts lay on the streets.
U.S. intelligence officials have long been concerned about the possibility of militant attack on the Ashoura festival, and coalition and Iraqi forces bolstered security around Karbala and other Shiite-majority towns in the south during the pilgrimage.
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.
In Beirut, a spokesman for Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, blamed American soldiers for the attacks, saying they were responsible for the security. Sheik Hamed Khafaf said U.S. officials had ignored repeated requests to bolster security for the pilgrims.
The Karbala blasts hit shortly after 10 a.m. near two of the most important shrines in Shiite Islam, hurling bodies in all directions and sending crowds of pilgrims fleeing in panic.
Three explosions rocked the inside and outside of the Kazimiya shrine in Baghdad at about the same time. Police sealed off the area while panicked people fled screaming and ambulances raced to the scene. Dozens of armed men in civilian clothes tried to maintain order.
The Kazimiya shrine in northern Baghdad contains the tombs of two other Shiite saints, Imam Mousa Kazem and his grandson Imam Muhammad al-Jawad.
In other developments:
Tuesday's blasts in Karbala struck near the golden-domed shrine where Imam Hussein is buried, in a neighborhood 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.
"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, giving only one name.
Two armed Iraqi policemen broke down in tears as they walked through the bomb site.
Iraqi militia initially tried to control the crowd and arrested two men the crowd attempted to lynch. Rumors swirled throughout the city as to the cause of the blasts, ranging from mortars fired from outside the town to suicide bombers in the crowd.
One witness said a bomb was hidden near the mosque.
"Many Iranians were killed, I was ten meters away, it was hidden under rubbish," one witness, identifying himself only as Sairouz, said.
Loudspeakers from the mosques continued to broadcast recitations from the Quran, only briefly interrupting the Ashoura commemoration to ask the crowd to part so that ambulances could move through the crowd. The mosques were not damaged by the blasts.
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.
"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."
Anger swelled among the survivors. Hundreds of arguments broke out. Some people blamed the Americans for stirring up religious tensions by launching the war. Others blamed al Qaeda or Sunni extremists.
In a letter released last month, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an extremist believed linked to al Qaeda, wrote that stepped up attacks were needed to disrupt the planned handover of power to the Iraqis on June 30.