Iraq Shi'ites targeted by suicide bombers

BAGHDAD-- A religious rite of mourning and penitence turned into a day of bloodshed yesterday as suicide bombers attacking Shi'ite Muslim worshipers and insurgents firing mortars and staging ambushes killed more than 30 people.

The attacks in and around Baghdad, which included six bombings, resulted in the deadliest day in Iraq since the Jan. 30 national elections.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the blasts, three of them suicide attacks, but Shi'ites blamed radical Sunni Muslim insurgents.

As with similar violence in recent weeks and months, the attacks appeared intended to inflame sectarian divisions among Iraqis. But Shi'ites defied the bombs and surged back into their mosques, vowing not to retaliate. At the same time, they braced for more violence today, the height of the Shi'ite observance of Ashura, a day on which bombs around Iraq killed more than 170 people last year.

"Whoever is trying to do this wants to create civil war," Ali Hussein, 39, a laborer, said at the site of one blast. "They couldn't stop the elections. They know if a civil war will start, no one will be able to stop it."

The violence rocked a country still forming a new government, one that will be led by Iraq's long-oppressed Shi'ite majority. Negotiations among political parties over who will be the next prime minister have failed to produce agreement, and there were signs that the wait was aggravating tension between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims.

During prayers yesterday at a mosque in central Baghdad, a senior figure in the Shi'ite coalition that won the most votes in the Jan. 30 parliamentary election bluntly warned of retaliation against officials who worked with the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein.

"We're going to assume power in a government that is a wreck," said Jalaleddin Saghir, prayer leader at the Bratha mosque. "Our society suffered from many problems . . . after the criminals of the Ba'ath Party returned to the security apparatus. There is a necessity of purifying the security apparatus. Do not expect us to practice our work with transparency."

The rituals taking place on the streets in Baghdad yesterday underscored the newly public importance of religion in Iraq, officially secular for most of Hussein's reign.

Shi'ites slaughtered sheep and cows and stirred the meat into huge pots of stew to feed neighbors, an Ashura tradition outlawed by Hussein.

"During the former regime, we couldn't do this," said Ali Yasari, 50, a merchant, directing his large family as they stirred the stew. Yesterday's attacks, he said, "are the tax we have to pay to achieve democracy and freedom."

The first blast occurred as prayers began in a mosque in Dora, a working-class neighborhood of Shi'ites and Sunnis in south Baghdad.

"A suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt came in and mixed with the guards who were searching the people who came to worship," Iraqi Army Sergeant Arias Hashim said. When challenged, the bomber detonated a vest packed with explosives.

Inside the mosque, a new sanctuary built after Hussein's fall, Anjad Sabah, 28, said he was listening to the preacher when the explosion jolted the congregation. "I went out immediately. I found people thrown here and there, covered with blood," Sabah said. "I even found children on the ground, wounded. I pulled some of them out and put them in the first car I found and told them to go to the hospital."

Dead and wounded were taken to Yarmuk Hospital, where taxi driver Ammar Faris, 29, later described the blast.

"I came to the prayer late. I was parking my car in front of the mosque, but before I switched it off, the explosion happened," said Faris, wan and breathing shallowly under a blanket that covered shrapnel wounds in his chest. "I didn't feel anything. I knew only that a crowd of people were carrying me, and then I found myself in the hospital." Hospital officials said 15 persons were killed and 34 wounded in the attack.

About 20 minutes later and 5 miles away, in the neighborhood of Bayaa, guards at another mosque got a phone call alerting them to the first explosion. Moments later, they saw three men get out of a car and start walking toward worshipers gathered outside the mosque.

Two guards in the balcony of the mosque shouted at the approaching strangers, said one of the guards there, who gave his name as Abu Murtadha. "The guards shouted 'stop, stop, stop.' But they didn't stop. So the guards by the gate shot at them.

"The first one blew up when the shots started. The second one threw a grenade, and then blew himself up. The third one ran toward the mosque and blew himself up," said Abu Murtadha, who wore a guard's badge bearing the picture of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

One person was killed by the attackers, according to an official at Yarmuk Hospital's chaotic receiving desk.

Five miles to the northeast, mortar shells struck a shop near a Shi'ite procession in Baghdad's Ash Shulah neighborhood. Police said three people were killed and five injured.

Attacks aimed at Iraqi and US security forces also exacted a heavy toll yesterday.

Two American soldiers were killed by bombs -- one near Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad, the other 25 miles north of the capital, according to the military. The military also announced the deaths of three soldiers in separate attacks on Thursday in and near the northern city of Mosul.

Also in Mosul, three mortar rounds fell on a bazaar near City Hall, killing a teenage boy and wounding three people, according to Zaid Azzam, a doctor at Republican Hospital.

And in Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, an Iraqi Army officer was shot to death, and three others, including a 2-year-old child, were wounded.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.