Iraq's prime minister flew to the holy city of Kerbala today and declared order had been restored after gunbattles among Shia factions killed 52 people and forced hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to flee.
Iraqi soldiers secure a road after clashes in Kerbala today, Pic: Reuters/Mushtaq Muhammad.
But the violence among Shias spread overnight, with gunmen attacking the offices of a powerful Shia party in at least five cities and setting many of them ablaze.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said his troops had restored calm to the city and blamed "outlawed armed criminal gangs from the remnants of the buried Saddam regime" for the violence.
He ordered army Major-General Salih al-Maliki, the head of the Kerbala command centre, to be sacked and investigated in the wake of the chaos, a defence ministry spokesman said.
"The situation in Kerbala is under control after military reinforcements arrived and police and military special forces have spread throughout the city to purge those killers and criminals," the prime minister said in a statement.
Sporadic and occasionally sustained gunfire could still be heard after dawn in the city, coming from the area around the revered shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, focal point of Shia celebrations yesterday.
Pilgrims were ordered out of the ancient centre of the city, 110 kilometres south of Baghdad.
The fighting killed 52 people and wounded at least 206, a senior security official in Baghdad said.
The fighting appeared to be between gunmen loyal to the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, possibly members of his Mehdi Army militia, and police linked to the rival Shia political movement, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), and its Badr Organisation.
The two powerful factions have increasingly clashed throughout the Shia south, areas where US forces have little or no presence.
An official at the shrines' media office, Ali Kadhum, said the two shrines had been slightly damaged, with bullets hitting their domes and minarets and an electric power station ruined.
Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims had gathered to commemorate the ninth century birth of Imam Mohammad al-Mahdi, the last of 12 imams that Shias revere as saints. The pilgrimage, like other annual rites, had become a show of force for a Shia community repressed under former leader Saddam Hussein.
In a sign the violence was spreading, police said five people had been killed in fighting between Mehdi Army militia and supporters of the Badr Organisation in Baghdad. Police said gunmen attacked five SIIC offices in the capital.
Sadr, one of Iraq's most influential clerics, urged calm. "Moqtada al-Sadr demands calm and asks the Sadrist followers not to take part in the disturbances," said Hazem al-Araji, a senior aide to the cleric.
Washington's 160,000 troops in Iraq have focused mainly on Sunni Arab and mixed areas of the country to defeat Sunni Arab insurgents and stamp out sectarian violence. But the prospect of war between Shia factions for control of the south is seen as a separate, growing threat to the country's stability.
Two governors of southern provinces, both members of SIIC, have been assassinated this month. In the biggest city in the south, the country's main oil centre of Basra, British forces are expected to withdraw soon and Shia factions are fighting for control.