Iraq blasts: 'All you could see was death everywhere'

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid
The Washington Post

	JOHN MOORE / AP A man is restrained by fellow Iraqis as they try to storm a U.S. camp in Baghdad, near where a series of explosions rocked a Shiite mosque earlier yesterday. U.S. troops went to the scene to help the wounded but retreated after Iraqis vented their outrage on them.
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Iraqi and American officials blamed the bombings on terrorists seeking to provoke conflict among Iraq's ethnic groups and to disrupt U.S. attempts to return sovereignty to a transitional Iraqi government on July 1.

No group asserted responsibility for the attacks, which occurred on Ashoura, the holiest day of the year for Shiites.

The festival was also the occasion of an attack on a Shiite procession two hours later in Quetta, Pakistan. At least 42 people — including two attackers — were killed and more than 160 were wounded. In Pakistan, the annual rites often spark violence between the Sunni Muslim majority and rival Shiite minority.

A main suspect, U.S. and Iraq officials said, was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian with reputed links to al-Qaida, who allegedly wrote an intercepted letter calling for attacks on Shiites.

While Shiites make up about 60 percent of Iraq's total population of 25 million, the country has been ruled by Sunnis since it gained independence in 1932 until the regime of Saddam Hussein was ousted this past year. Sunnis constitute about one third of Iraq's population.

In recent months, Shiite clerics have called for national elections, which would virtually ensure them taking power. That has caused fear among some Sunnis that they would become a political minority, and insurgents are probably trying to tap into that fear.

When Muslims split: Ashoura marks the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, in a desert battle near Karbala that was a defining moment in the split between Islam's Sunni and Shiite sects. Hussein's father, Imam Ali, had been killed 20 years earlier, and leadership of Islam was claimed by the Damascus-based Sunni Ummayad dynasty. But Ali's followers, the Shiites, rallied behind his son and moved from the Arabian peninsula into Iraq, chased by forces of the Ummayad caliph Yazid. On the 10th day of the Muslim month of Muharram, in A.D. 680, the Ummayads attacked Hussein and his small group of supporters and killed them. Shiites from around the world traditionally gather at Hussein's tomb in Karbala and other Shiite holy sites in Iraq on the anniversary. Black-garbed pilgrims flagellate themselves with chains and cut themselves in grief at Hussein's death while others re-create the battle in which he was killed. The Associated Press

Iraq's U.S.-appointed political leadership said the twin attacks were designed to provoke Shiites into fighting U.S. troops and to spark a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis.

The attack marked the deepening of an apparent strategic shift by insurgents, who increasingly are targeting vulnerable Iraqis rather than U.S. military forces.

The synchronized attacks by as many as a dozen bombers, which also involved planted explosives and possibly mortars, transformed two of the world's most sacred Shiite shrines into scenes of carnage. Wooden carts used to ferry elderly pilgrims were stacked with bloodied victims. Piles of shoes from the dead were stacked near the site of each blast.

"After the blast, all you could see was death everywhere you looked," said Ahmed Kamil Ibrahim, a guard at the Imam Kadhim shrine in Baghdad. "It was horrible."

The pilgrims were commemorating the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad, in a seventh-century battle in Karbala. His death solidified the division of the Muslim world into Shiites loyal to Hussein and orthodox Sunnis.

Iraqi security officials estimated that 2 million Shiites streamed into Karbala over the past week to pray at Hussein's gold-domed tomb yesterday. Pilgrims from neighboring Iran joined Iraqis, along with visitors from elsewhere in the Shiite world: Pakistan, India, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf countries.

Iran said at least 22 Iranians were among the dead. Iranians by the tens of thousands have flooded across the common border with Iraq since Saddam's ouster in April, able to visit the most important Shiite shrines for the first time in decades.

An Iranian vice president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, blamed al-Qaida for the attacks in Iraq and Pakistan.

But much of the outrage of Shiites in Iraq was directed at the Americans.

"This is the work of Jews and American occupation forces," a loudspeaker outside Kazimiya shrine blared.

Survivors at both shrines blamed Sunni Muslim extremists for perpetrating the blasts but faulted U.S. forces for not doing enough to prevent them.

	JOHN MOORE / AP A U.S. Army soldier takes cover at the entrance of Camp Bonzai after a stone-throwing mob attacked U.S. forces yesterday near the base in Baghdad.

A mob of Iraqis assaulted U.S. troops and medics who tried to control crowds and help wounded at Kazimiya, pelting them with stones and forcing their convoy of Humvees back into a nearby walled outpost. Two soldiers suffered broken bones. When the Iraqis tried to storm the outpost, U.S. soldiers fired tear gas to disperse them.

The attacks prompted strident denunciations of U.S. military policy from several senior Shiite leaders, who have expressed grudging tolerance of the occupation that has kept the insurgency from spreading to Shiite-dominated southern Iraq.

The country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Hussein al-Sistani, released a statement accusing U.S. troops of "noticeable procrastination in controlling the borders of Iraq and preventing infiltrators" as well as failing to supply Iraqi security forces with "the necessary equipment to do their jobs."

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, said seven suspected attackers had been caught and were in the custody of Iraqi police, including one man at the Baghdad shrine whose explosive vest did not detonate.

As possible evidence that the blasts in Baghdad and Karbala, 60 miles to the south, might have been part of a larger plan for violence, police in the southern port city of Basra said they arrested four would-be suicide bombers, among them two women wearing explosive belts. In Najaf, another sacred Shiite city, Iraqi officials said police defused a bomb on Monday night that might have been timed to explode yesterday.

The explosions appeared to provoke a new sense of despair among Iraqis — Sunnis and Shiites alike — already anxious about their nation's future. The Governing Council declared three days of national mourning and postponed the signing of an interim constitution that had been scheduled for today.

"What is happening to our country?" one woman wailed near the Kadhim shrine. "These were just innocent people who came here to pray."

The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said the bombers were trying to interfere with its transition to democracy by fueling religious tension.

Unofficial casualty reports, however, put the toll in Baghdad and Karbala as high as 230. Many bodies were dismembered and others were taken directly for burial, making an official count difficult. Hospital morgues in Baghdad and Karbala were overflowing with bodies, many unidentified.

With yesterday's attacks, about 1,000 Iraqis have died in suicide bombings and other attacks since major combat ended in Iraq on May 1, according to figures compiled by Iraq's Interior Ministry and news reports.

Shadid reported from Karbala. Washington Post staff writer Ariana Eunjung Cha in Baghdad contributed to this report. Information from The Associated Press and Newsday is also included.

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