Explosions kill at least 27 pilgrims in Iraq
Attack is latest to target Shi’ite observance
BAGHDAD - At least two explosions tore through crowds marching to the burial place of Shi’ite Islam’s most revered martyr yesterday in the culmination of ritual mourning that has drawn millions to the holy city of Karbala in one of the world’s largest pilgrimages. At least 27 people were killed and dozens more were wounded.
There was a sense of fatalism to the attacks, one of dozens this week on pilgrims that the Shi’ite-led government grimly predicted but was powerless to stop. The killings have underlined the meaning of the pilgrimage: a religious ceremony to commemorate Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed whose death on the battlefield in Karbala in 680 gave Shi’ite Muslims an ethos of suffering, martyrdom, and resistance.
“They think these explosions can stop us from marching,’’ said Muhaned Shaker, a 27-year-old pilgrim, “but if I die today in an explosion, that will be a gift from God.’’
Interior Ministry officials said a suicide car bomb had detonated at the Peace Bridge a few miles east of the city, tearing through a crowd so tight that people were standing shoulder to shoulder. Moments later, a mortar shell exploded nearby, killing and wounding more pilgrims as they frantically fled the scene. In the chaotic aftermath, officials said, the crowds rendered rescuers almost helpless to treat the wounded.
The attacks came amid a stubborn crisis over the disqualifications of hundreds of candidates from Iraq’s parliamentary elections in March for ties to the Ba’ath party of Saddam Hussein.
An appeals court decided Wednesday to delay their appeals until after the vote, effectively restoring their candidacies. But since then, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Shi’ite leaders have called the court’s decision illegal and insisted that the disqualifications proceed, casting politics into more tumult.
The dispute has taken a personal turn, with Maliki complaining in a statement late Thursday of intervention by the US ambassador, Christopher R. Hill. He said his government would not allow Hill “to exceed his diplomatic duties.’’
Philip Frayne, a US Embassy spokesman, defended Hill’s role. “Ambassador Hill has been doing what any diplomat normally does, offering his government’s views on issues that could affect American interests,’’ Frayne said.
American officials and the United Nations have played a crucial role in trying to solve the complicated dispute over the candidacies.
The issue of Ba’athists has become incendiary in the campaign for the March 7 vote, with religious Shi’ite candidates competing with one another in proving their anti-Ba’athist credentials to a constituency that suffered dearly under Saddam’s rule. Iraqi law has also proved unhelpful in ending the dispute, as there is no precedence for resolving who has the final say on candidate disqualifications.
In the attacks near Karbala, the Interior Ministry said 27 people were killed and 75 wounded.
Officials in Karbala put the toll at 40 killed and more than 150 wounded, although they acknowledged the difficulty in determining numbers amid the chaos.
Yesterday was the observance of Arbaeen, the 40th day after the date marking Imam Hussein’s death. Banned under Saddam’s government, the pilgrimage has flourished in the years since the US-led invasion in 2003. This year, city officials estimated that 10 million people journeyed to the gold-domed shrine in Karbala. Security officials put the number higher, at 11 million, and clerics insisted that it was even more.
By custom, pilgrims walk to the shrine, carrying green, red, and black flags and sometimes traveling hundreds of miles over days. Occasionally, pilgrims choose to walk barefoot. The sheer numbers have given the region around Karbala a cinematic quality, as people clamber through date groves and surge through the streets in one of the world’s largest voluntary movements of people.
