At Least 143 Die in Attacks at Two Sacred Sites in Iraq

March 3, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 2 — Suicide bombers and other attackers detonated mortars, grenades and roadside bombs on Tuesday among crowds of Shiite Muslims gathered for one of the holiest occasions in the Shiite calendar.

Within a few hours, the death toll was at 143; counts made in the evening put it as high as 170. Some of the dead were reportedly pilgrims from Iran.

It was the deadliest day in the 11 months since American troops toppled Saddam Hussein's Sunni Muslim-dominated government. Both attacks began around 10 a.m., at mosques in Baghdad and Karbala, a Shiite holy city some 70 miles southwest of the capital.

Scenes of horror at the sites caused waves of anger and hysteria, much of it focused on the American occupation. In Baghdad, streaks of blood and bits of flesh were strewn across the walls of golden tile and stone floors at the shrine to Imam Musa al-Khadam, considered the city's most sacred Shiite site. In Karbala, groups of wailing survivors outside two revered mosques loaded the dead and wounded onto wooden carts, leaving trails of blood as they rushed in search of help.

The highest previous toll during the American occupation was the 105 people killed in two bombings of Kurdish political gatherings in the north, at Erbil, on Feb. 1.

Senior officials in the American occupation authority pointed a finger at Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Sunni militant. Last month, American officials released a letter they said had been written by Mr. Zarqawi to senior leaders of Al Qaeda asking for help in starting a "sectarian war" in Iraq by attacking Shiites in order to prompt a counterattack by them against the Sunnis.

One of the four suicide bombers was arrested when his explosive-laden vest failed to detonate. Witnesses said he appeared to be a foreigner, but the occupation authorities declined to state his nationality.

But Iraqis on the streets blamed the Americans, rather than the Sunnis. Angry crowds denounced the United States for failing to protect them. Occupation authorities said they had pulled American troops away from holy sites during the religious celebrations after discussions with Shiite leaders.

There was also a devastating attack on Tuesday on Shiites celebrating the same holy day, Ashura, in Pakistan. There, three assailants threw grenades and sprayed gunfire at a procession in Quetta, in the southwest. At least 40 people were killed and 150 wounded, officials said. [Page A10.]

In Washington, an intelligence official said there was no indication of any link between the attacks in Pakistan and Iraq.

At the Khadamiya hospital in Baghdad, groups of anguished family members pushed past rifle-wielding guards and rushed to a low-lying concrete building used as a refrigerated morgue.

"For Allah's sake, tell me about Hussein, is he O.K.?" one young man shouted as he approached two brothers clasping each other, weeping, outside the morgue. "No, he is dead," one replied.

In Karbala, Salah Jabber, a 30-year-old factory worker from Basra, lay in a hospital with seven chunks of shrapnel in his broken left leg, and recalled the swiftness of the onslaught.

"I heard a remote explosion near Baghdad Street, maybe a kilometer and a half away," he said. "After a minute, there was another explosion that was nearer. After yet another minute, another explosion. The fourth one was next to me."

Men are the main celebrants of Ashura, in which the death of the Shiite hero Imam Hussein in A.D. 680 is honored with re-enactments and ritual cutting of the scalp. Therefore men heavily outnumbered women and children among the dead.

But at the Khadamiya hospital, several women in black robes lay crumpled among the dead and on bloodied stretchers outside. At the Karbala hospital, after the morgue overflowed, bodies were stacked in an office, alongside a filing cabinet, as pools of blood gathered.

For hours, people pushed opened the doors and stepped among the dead, collapsing with grief when they found loved ones.

Just outside the hospital in Karbala, workers laid bodies in a jagged line on the sandy rubble along one wall, shrouded in tarpaulins and plaid blankets.

"We have lots of people who have come to give blood," a worker told Ali Hussein, the hospital's deputy director.

"I don't need people to give blood," Mr. Hussein told him. "I need people to carry bodies."

By early evening, a steady stream of rough coffins flowed into the hospital yard.

In classified reports last month, American officials in Washington said, United States intelligence agencies warned that Ashura, culminating on Tuesday, could attract new attacks on Shiites, who account for 60 percent of Iraq's population of 25 million.

But American commanders said extensive discussions with Shiite leaders had led to an agreement that American troops should respect "cultural differences" by staying well back from religious sites.

In Baghdad, the American military presence in the hours that preceded and followed the attacks was mainly in the form of helicopters that circled warily overhead.

In Karbala, the command of allied military units lies with Polish troops, who similarly stayed back from the mosques. Iraqi police and religious paramilitary groups had closed the city center to cars and set up checkpoints for those walking to the shrines. But the searches of people and bags were rushed, and the crowds were vast.

The attacks intensified fears that the American deadline for turning over sovereignty to the Iraqis by June 30 could lead to chaos as a divided provisional government confronts a mounting drumroll of attacks.

President Bush agreed in November to move up the date under intense pressure from Iraqis and from foreign governments. Before the latest attacks, a new optimism had been spreading among top occupation officials, particularly after Iraqi leaders agreed early Monday to an interim constitution that will serve until elections can be held.

American officials have repeatedly predicted an intensification of attacks against American and Iraqi targets as the transfer date approaches. But the intensity of the two Iraq attacks, and their careful coordination, appeared to shock some American officials.

L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator, issued a statement expressing American sympathy for the victims and offering renewed assurances that Iraqis will not be left to chaos and bloodshed after June 30. "We pray for your strength in this time of sorrow," he said. "We of the coalition will not abandon the people of Iraq."

He also referred obliquely to the Zarqawi letter.

"Terrorists have murdered and maimed on one of the holiest days of the year," he said. "We know they did this as part of an effort to provoke sectarian violence among Muslims," because, he said, "they believe it is the only way they can stop Iraq's march towards the democracy that the terrorists fear."

Shiites from as far as Uzbekistan had converged on Karbala during the last week. In Tehran, Interior Ministry officials said at least 20 of the dead, and possibly as many as 50, were Iranians, part of a large pilgrimage to Karbala and Najaf, another Iraqi city holy to Shiites.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the American command, said the latest attacks bore all the earmarks of an operation led by Mr. Zarqawi, with multiple suicide bombings closely sequenced to kill as many people as possible, and, in Karbala, added strikes with mortars, grenades and roadside bombs.

"This was not a pick-up team; this was not an organization that was just started," he said. "All the indications we have is that Zarqawi is a prime suspect, if not the prime suspect."

American officials say his previous attacks included the devastating suicide bombings last year of the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which together killed more than 40 people, including the chief United Nations representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

But the intelligence official in Washington said it was not yet clear who might have been responsible. "Something like this would seem to fall in line with the strategy laid out by Zarqawi in his letter," the official said. "But at this point, it isn't clear who was responsible."

General Kimmitt said little about the suicide bomber who was captured alive. But witnesses at the Imam Musa al-Khadam shrine said some members of a crowd that dragged a man away after grenades had been thrown from a hotel overlooking the shrine, beating him senseless as they went, were shouting that the man was a Yemeni.

After the Baghdad bombing, Iraqi officers summoned help from the Americans at a joint operations center set up with Iraqi agreement half a mile away. A convoy of United States military vehicles approached the shrine, including an armored ambulance and several Humvees, only to be barred from approaching by an angry crowd throwing stones and shouting curses against America.

Later, American officers said, a crowd marched on the operations center, pelting soldiers and tanks with stones, and was met with warning shots.

An Iraqi witness, Ali Haider, said he saw two Iraqis shot and wounded, but American military spokesmen said they had no record of any injuries. A second attempt to storm the high-walled operations center was repulsed, Mr. Haider said, when American soldiers leveled their rifles and drove the protesters back.

And yet the violence did not stop the pilgrims, many of whom remained to honor Imam Hussein. Only four hours after the explosions, they once again filtered through the roads toward the shrine in Karbala, beating their breasts and singing his name.

They passed three blast sites; at each lay a mound of shoes and slippers, left from the dead and wounded.

Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article and Neela Banerjee from Karbala.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company