Dozens die in Iraq as attacks mar Shi'ite holy day

BAGHDAD -- A wave of bombings and suicide attacks yesterday targeted worshipers celebrating Shi'ite Islam's holiest day, killing dozens of people, including an American soldier, and wounding more than 100.

It was the second day in a row of deadly attacks, most of them intended for throngs of Shi'ite pilgrims observing Ashoura.

Accounts of yesterday's death toll varied. Captain Sabah Yassin, a Defense Ministry official, told the Associated Press that 55 people had been killed in Baghdad and nearby towns. At least 35 people were killed Friday.

Among yesterday's violence, two suicide bombers wearing explosive vests blew themselves up at Aden Square, a crowded section of Kadhamiya, the shrine area in Baghdad that was a top destination for Shi'ite pilgrims. Nineteen people were killed in those blasts, according to Iraqi police and other official reports.

In the town of Latifiyah, south of Baghdad, a bomber drove a car packed with explosives into an Iraqi Army checkpoint, killing nine soldiers. And in an audacious attack, another suicide bomber on a bicycle rolled into a funeral tent erected for a Sunni woman in southwest Baghdad, apparently mistaking it for one full of Shi'ites. At least three people died in the explosion.

The toll was significantly lower than during last year's Ashoura, when bombs and mortars in Baghdad and the shrine city of Karbala killed more than 180. But the latest violence marks an escalation in the insurgent attacks against civilians and Iraqi security forces that almost exclusively claim the lives of Shi'ites.

During Ashoura, hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites march to shrines in the city of Karbala and in the Kadhamiya district of Baghdad, mourning the death in 680 of Imam Hussein, who they believe was the rightful heir to the Prophet Mohammed. Yesterday morning, men beat their heads with swords, while others whipped their own backs with chains. Women chanted dirges and slapped themselves in the face.

Security around pilgrimage sites was extremely high, especially after Friday's carnage.

In the Aden Square attacks, the two attackers struck shortly after noon after they were unable to pass the first checkpoint in a section serving as a makeshift bus depot for pilgrims. A witness said one of the bombers boarded a school bus and detonated his vest, killing at least 17 Iraqis, according to Reuters. The second bomber blew himself up next to a police car, killing two people. Witnesses heard a third explosion, which may have been a mortar.

''Everything was a mess. It smelled like someone had slaughtered a sheep," said Saeed Hatem, 34, who had just left his house when the bus bomb went off.

The blast left the bus's engine block twisted and blew out the entire back of the vehicle. Blood and flesh coated trees and walls.

The sound of the blasts, accompanied by mortar and machine-gun fire, pierced the calm of the early afternoon as Shi'ites turned out in a display of religious freedom banned under Saddam Hussein.

Most pilgrims, having finished their mourning ritual, were eating a traditional dish of boiled meat, lentils, and chickpeas cooked on the roadside in enormous pots the size of oil barrels.

A half-mile from Aden Square, a crowd was watching a passion play about the martyring of Imam Hussein; men on horseback reenacted the battle that killed Hussein and his followers.

About 1,000 people who had gathered in the small lot fled at the sound of the explosions. Police warned running passersby that they had intercepted a pair of women wearing vests of explosives and had found at least one car bomb that failed to detonate.

Police and witnesses said there were four other bomb attacks in the Aadhamiya district, just across the river from Kadhamiya.

The US military would not say which of the suicide bomb attacks killed the American soldier.

A 47-year-old who only wanted his nickname, Abu Zaid, published, said he was returning home from the shrine and saw the body of one of the suicide bombers in Aadhamiya at the base of the bridge. Iraqi soldiers had placed the remains on a piece of cardboard, Abu Zaid said.

''They said they will leave the body as a feast for the dogs," he said.

Iraqi police said the attacks outside of Baghdad targeted Iraqi National Guard soldiers and included a suicide bombing outside a Guard compound in Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, which killed six; a mortar attack on the highway south of Baghdad that killed another six; and the bombing that killed nine in Latifiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad.

Shi'ite leaders have consistently called for their followers to show restraint in the face of the attacks against them.

''When the people are killed, 90 percent of them are Shi'a," Adil Abdel-Mahdi, a leading official of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a top contender for prime minister, said in a recent interview.

''We are not going to raise our arms because we are attacked, or because al-Zarqawi and others want to push us into civil war," Abdel-Mahdi said, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who says his group, Tawhid and Jihad, represents Al Qaeda in Iraq.

A Sunni group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, also criticized the attack against ''our innocent Shi'ite brothers."

''We doubt that those who did this belong to Islam," the party said. ''The response to these crimes should be more unity between the people of the nation, regardless of their religion or sect."

The violence occurred as a five-member US congressional delegation was visiting the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

''The fact that you have these suicide bombers now, wreaking such hatred and violence while people pray, is to me an indication of their failure," said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York. ''The results of the election are a strong rebuke to those who did not believe that the Iraqi people would take this opportunity to demonstrate their own commitment to their own future."

Another senator, speaking after the group met with Iraqi and US officials, asked the American public for patience.

''The one thing I have learned from this trip is we are a long way from being able to leave," said Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. ''To leave too soon would be devastating. To stay too long would be unnecessary."

Republicans John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine and Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin also were on the trip.

Globe correspondent Usama Hashim contributed to this report. Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.