Iraq civil war fears as attacks kill 170 pilgrims: Shia holy sites targeted in country's bloodiest day since fall of Saddam Hussein

Wednesday, Mar 03, 2004

The staff at Baghdad's Kadhimiya hospital ran out of mortuary space yesterday. So they laid out the dead in a courtyard where tormented relations moved from corpse to corpse, lifting the cardboard that covered what remained of their loved ones' faces.

Altogether, more than 170 people died in co-ordinated attacks on two sites sacred to Shia Muslims. Three bombs hit Kadhimiya, a northern suburb of Baghdad. A shrine at Karbala, 70km south of the Iraqi capital, was targeted by at least five devices. Both sites were packed with Shia Muslims from Iraq and overseas celebrating the climax of the mourning period of Ashura.

Fakher Jabir, a civil servant in Baghdad, said: "I was coming out of the Iranian school when the first bomb went off about 70 metres away and everyone ducked. Then they started running. The police were trying to calm them down so that vehicles could get through."

He added: "At least 35 people were killed in front of me, including women and children. I was loading them on to trucks. I was picking limbs off the street. Am I supposed to be picking arms and hands off the street?"

No group claimed responsibility for yesterday's violence but the attacks raise the spectre of a civil war in Iraq pitting Sunni against Shia Muslim.

Members of Iraq's Governing Council condemned those responsible for the country's bloodiest day since the fall of Saddam Hussein as "the forces of evil intent on sowing the seeds of havoc and civil war".

Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shia cleric, blamed occupation forces for failing to provide security and controlling Iraq's borders. He urged Iraqis to unite and speed up "regaining the injured country's sovereignty, independence and stability".

The US military said suicide bombers and mortars had been used in the Karbala attack.

"This was a very sophisticated attack, well co-ordinated," said Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, US military spokesman. Reports said at least 58 were killed at Kadhimiya and at least 112 at Karbala.

Yesterday's toll surpassed that of August 19, when Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN special envoy, and 21 others died in Baghdad; that of August 29, when Muhammed Baqir al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and at least 84 others were killed in Najaf; and that of February 1, when two suicide bombers killed 105 people, including many senior Kurdish leaders, in Arbil.

So great was the carnage yesterday that Kadhimiya hospital ran short of blood. Thousands of people swarmed to medical centres in and around Kadhimiya in response to radio appeals for donors.

"We are boiling with rage but we will be patient," said eye-witness Ahmed Abbas, as he surveyed hundreds of shoes of the dead and injured in Kadhimiya. "Sunnis have nothing to do with this crime, they were Wahhabis," he added, referring to the puritanical Saudi-based sect which denounces the Shia practice of visiting shrines as pagan.

Others blamed the Americans for dissolving the country's security forces. Earlier reports, Page 7 Editorial Comment, Page 18

By JAMES DRUMMOND and NICOLAS PELHAM