Iraq suffered its worst day of violence since the end of the war yesterday when its majority Shia community was targeted in a series of sophisticated and simultaneous attacks that killed as many as 170 people and left its religious leaders blaming the Americans for multiple security failures. Michael Howard in Kerbala & James Meek in Baghdad report.
Crowds in Kerbala and Baghdad turned on US troops in frustration and fury as the scale of the atrocities in both cities became clear, raising fears that the Shias will seek revenge and bring the country to the brink of a religious civil war.
The US military last night pointed to al-Qaeda involvement in the multiple explosions on one of the holiest days in the Shia calendar, with a Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate of Osama bin Laden, being named as the prime suspect.
In January, Kurdish forces near the Iranian border intercepted a letter, purported to have been written by al-Zarqawi, outlining a strategy of spectacular attacks on Shias, aimed at sparking a Sunni-Shia civil war.
Last night the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, warned that the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty, due to take place on June 30th, could be jeopardised by the ongoing campaign. The influential Shia spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, blamed the US-led occupation forces in Iraq for failing to secure the country's borders and called for unity.
"We put responsibility on the occupation forces for the noticeable procrastination in controlling the borders of Iraq and preventing infiltrators, and not strengthening Iraqi national forces and supplying them with the necessary equipment to their jobs," he said in a statement.
The attacks were aimed at Shia pilgrims celebrating the festival of Ashura, which marks the death of the revered martyr Iman Hussein 13 centuries ago. At 10 a.m. in Kerbala, with thousands crammed around the golden-domed Iman Hussein shrine, the first of five bombs exploded. Four others followed in as many minutes in streets packed with pilgrims trying to escape.
"The blasts occurred within a two-mile radius of Hussein's shrine and appear to have been aimed at causing the maximum number of casualties," said Capt Ali Hussein of the Kerbala police.
Almost simultaneously, two miles away at Kerbala's "Baghdad gate", a busy dropping off point for taxis and buses from the capital, a suicide bomber stepped off the kerb into a crowd of pilgrims and set off his device. That explosion killed perhaps 20 people, said eyewitnesses.
In the mayhem, a number of Iranian pilgrims and foreign journalists were beaten up as some Iraqis looked to apportion blame, and crowds of survivors ran to hospitals to give blood.
Some of the pilgrims explicitly blamed Americans for stirring up religious tensions by launching the war. Others blamed al-Qaeda or Sunni extremists.
One leading Shia cleric, Sheikh Ahmed al-Safi, last night claimed 112 people - including 15 children - had already died in Kerbala. More than 230 were injured. Seventy miles away in Baghdad - and at almost exactly the same time - the Kazimiya shrine, also surrounded by tens of thousands of Shias, was targeted by three suicide bombers, killing 58 people, according to the US military. Two bombers are thought to have blown themselves up at its doors and a third detonated his bomb inside the shrine, according to witnesses.
Rescue workers who raced to the mosaic-walled courtyard inside the shrine found the area strewn with the dead and maimed.
"I saw the suicide bomber walk into the crowd, and then he blew himself up and just disappeared. It was terrifying. There was flesh flying, there were bodies flying," one of the caretakers of the mosque, Mr Saad Abdul-Zahara, told the New York Times. - (Guardian Service)