Qaeda Blamed as Attacks on Shi'ites Kill 143 in Iraq
Updated 1:35 PM ET March 2, 2004
By Suleiman al-Khalidi and Luke Baker
BAGHDAD/KERBALA, Iraq (Reuters) - A wave of suicide bombings and mortar attacks on vast crowds of Shi'ite worshippers killed at least 143 people Tuesday, Iraq's bloodiest day since Saddam Hussein's fall.
Leaders of the country's 60 percent Shi'ite majority said the bloodbaths were intended to ignite civil war. The Iraqi Governing Council blamed a Jordanian who Washington says is working for al Qaeda and trying to fuel chaos in Iraq.
The U.S. military said three suicide bombers killed 58 people in Baghdad around the Kadhimiya mosque, and a suicide bomber, mortars and concealed bombs combined to kill at least 85 in Kerbala, a Shi'ite holy city 110 km (68 miles) to the south.
The near-simultaneous attacks ripped through an annual ritual -- banned under the Sunni Saddam -- during which Shi'ites beat their heads and chests and cut their heads with swords to honor a revered figure killed in battle 1,324 years ago.
In Kerbala, where at least two million worshippers had gathered, rescuers raced through the streets with bodies stacked two or three deep on wooden carts, desperately searching for a doctor or an ambulance.
Shi'ites who earlier had ritually gashed open their heads with swords queued up to give blood to the wounded. Many of the victims were blown to pieces. A man's scalp and ear lay alongside rotting fruit.
IRAQI LEADERS BLAME AL QAEDA
Several Governing Council members blamed the blasts on Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom Washington suspects of being behind a series of major attacks in Iraq.
U.S. forces have placed a $10 million bounty on his head. They said last month they had intercepted a computer disc with a letter from Zarqawi urging suicide bomb attacks on Shi'ites to inflame sectarian tension in Iraq.
"This was a clear and tragically well organized act of terrorism," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations for the U.S. Army in Iraq, told a news conference.
He said a man strapped with explosives had been apprehended near the Baghdad mosque -- the capital's holiest Shi'ite shrine -- and several people had been arrested in Kerbala.
"In both cases they are being held by the Iraqi police service and we expect soon that they will be providing us information in terms of their nationality, and perhaps their motivation as well," Kimmitt said.
In a separate attack in Baghdad, guerrillas threw a bomb at a U.S. military vehicle, killing one American soldier and seriously wounding another, the army said. The death took to 379 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action since the start of the U.S.-led war in Iraq nearly a year ago.
In southwest Pakistan, Shi'ites in a procession to mark the same festival as their Iraqi brethren were attacked by suspected Sunni radicals with guns and bombs. At least 44 were killed and more than 150 wounded, hospital sources said.
GOVERNING COUNCIL CALLS FOR CALM
Unsure who to blame, survivors in Baghdad hurled stones at U.S. troops who arrived on the scene.
In Kerbala, enraged Shi'ites turned on Iranian pilgrims after the blasts -- even though Iran said at least 22 Iranians were among the dead in the city and dozens had been wounded.
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, issued a statement from his office in Najaf calling for national unity but criticizing U.S.-led occupation forces for not doing enough to secure Iraq's borders against infiltrators.
Shi'ites on the Governing Council urged calm and unity among all of Iraq's myriad religious and ethnic groups.
"The civil war and sectarian strife that Zarqawi wants to inflict on the people of Iraq will not succeed. Zarqawi failed, his gang and their evil plans have failed," Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, a Shi'ite Governing Council member, told a news conference.
Hamid al-Bayati, a senior official in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading Shi'ite political group, blamed Saddam loyalists and al Qaeda.
Iraq's U.S. governor Paul Bremer said in a statement: "The terrorists want sectarian violence because they believe that is the only way they can stop Iraq's march toward the democracy that the terrorists fear."
Monday, the competing religious and ethnic groups in the Governing Council agreed on an interim constitution, putting aside differences over the role of Islam, representation for women and Kurdish demands for autonomy.
The agreement was due to have been signed Wednesday but officials said this may be postponed out of respect for a three-day mourning period for the victims of Tuesday's attacks.
It will be done on foreign soil because the American public does not, cannot, and will not believe that our own government is behind creating the illusion of terrorism and sowing the seeds of global destruction for the monetary gain of the few at the expense of the many:
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