Attack in Karbala Is Followed by Another in Najaf

By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 19 - Only days into Iraq's six-week election campaign, an eruption of violence today killed at least 60 people and wounded about 120 others in car bombings in Iraq's two holiest Shiite cities, Najaf and Karbala. In Baghdad, a group of about 30 insurgents hurling hand grenades and firing machineguns pulled three election officials from their car in the midst of morning traffic and executed them in the road with shots to the head.

The killings raised the specter of exactly the kind of violence that American and Iraqi officials have been hoping to minimize ahead of elections on Jan. 30 that are a key watershed in the American-inspired blueprint for democracy in Iraq.

Iraqi politicians arguing for a delay in the elections to allow for renewed mediation efforts with Sunni insurgents have repeatedly warned of the risks of a wave of sectarian killings, as well as attacks on election officials and candidates.

In Baghdad, the Iraqi Election Commission, supervising the campaign, described the victims of the election workers' ambush on Baghdad's notorious Haifa Street as martyrs and appealed to all Iraqis to "support the lives of our officials."

In Najaf and Karbala, officials said the bombings, within two hours of each other and both in crowded city-center areas near the Shiite sect's holiest shrines, were the work of Sunni extremists seeking to ignite sectarian strife with the country's Shiite majority.

The bombings were the worst violence in the two pilgrim cities in several months, and seemed calculated to cause maximum loss of life, and provoke a wave of anger among religious Shiites.

In Karbala, a suicide bomber detonated his vehicle amid minibuses at the entrance to the city's bus terminal. In Najaf, a car exploded in a central square crowded with people watching a funeral procession. The crowd included the provincial governor and the city's police chief, both of whom escaped unhurt.

Eyewitness accounts of the bombings told of residents pulling bodies from the rubble of shops and market stalls around Maidan Square in the heart of the old city of Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad. An Associated Press report quoted Yousef Munim, an administrator at the city's al-Hakim hospital, as saying that the hospital's preliminary account showed 47 people killed, and 69 wounded.

The blast occurred 300 yards from the Imam Ali shrine, one of the most sacred in Shiite Islam, which was the center of a lengthy American-led military offensive in August that drove rebels loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, from the city.

In Karbala, about 50 miles north of Najaf, the bomb exploded about 400 yards from the Imam Hussein shrine, another sacred site, as well as the location of a bomb blast last Wednesday that killed 12 people and injured dozens of others, including a cleric who is a close aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric.

Accounts from Karbala today told of firefighters struggling to put out blazes as ambulances ferried burned and bleeding casualties to the nearby al-Hussein hospital. Ali al-Ardawi, an assistant to the hospital's director, said 14 people were know to have been killed and 52 wounded, according to a report filed by a free-lance reporter for The New York Times.

The attacks prompted an outcry among Shiite religious leaders, who blamed Sunni insurgents and said they were attempting to provoke sectarian strife ahead of the elections. "They are trying to ignite a sectarian civil war and prevent elections from going ahead on time," said Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum, a moderate cleric, who has maintained ties with American officials and worked to develop the political timetable that calls for Iraq to have a fully-elected government, and a permanent constitution, by January 2006. But, he added, "They have failed before, and they will fail again."

Elsewhere in the 20-month conflict, masked insurgents issued a videotape showing what they said were 10 abducted Iraqis who had been working for an American company, the Sandi Group, and said they would kill them all unless the company pulled out of Iraq. The company, one of dozens of American, European and Middle Eastern enterprises engaged in stuttering efforts to rebuild Iraq's decrepit infrastructure, employs more than 7,000 people in Iraq, company officials said.

The day also brought what appeared to be an attempt by Saddam Hussein, or at least by lawyers saying they spoke for him, to influence the elections from his cell in an American detention center. The lawyers, hired by Mr. Hussein's family to defend him before the Iraqi tribunal set up to try top leaders of his ousted government, told a news conference in Jordan that an Iraqi lawyer who met Mr. Hussein last week said he had urged Iraqis to be "wary" of the elections.

The head of the legal team, Ziad Khassawneh, said the Iraqi lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, traveled to Jordan after the meeting on Thursday - the first Mr. Hussein has had with legal counsel since his capture last Dec. 13, - then returned to Baghdad after reporting on Mr. Hussein's remarks, according to a report by Agence France-Presse.

The Jordanian lawyer said Mr. Hussein had offered "recommendations" to Iraqis through Mr. Dulaimi, among them an injunction on the need for unity, a call for Iraqi religious leaders to face their "historical responsibility" for developments here, and the caution about elections.

Mr. Khassawneh said Mr. Hussein quoted a verse from the Koran, "Hold on to God's law and don't scatter," while urging unity, and added, "He also insisted that Iraq's religious leaders, of all factions, have a role and must bear the historical responsibility for what is happening in Iraq."

On elections, the lawyer said, Mr. Saddam asked to be briefed on developments in the country, and was told that there were to be elections. "At that point, the president said to Dulaimi that the Iraqi people should 'be wary of this issue,' " Mr. Khassawneh said.

The reported remarks, comparatively mild compared with Mr. Hussein's fulminations against the United States and its role in Iraq when he made a brief court appearance in Baghdad last summer, appeared to reflect constraints imposed on lawyers who have met Mr. Hussein and his top aides in the past week. An Iraqi official familiar with the tribunal's work said the lawyers had been told that they were not to discuss events in Iraq since the men were captured and subjected to a prison routine that denies them access to newspapers, radio and television.

The election campaign, with more than competing 100 political slates, began officially when the deadline for candidate registrations closed last Wednesday. A further deadline comes on Monday, when those who have registered have their last chance to reconfigure the multiparty alliances - or to forge new ones - that are expected to attract the largest share of votes. As the alliances stand, the battle appears to lie mainly between several predominantly Shiite blocs, including a powerful alliance of religious parties; groups that assemble Sunni and Shiite candidates in secular coalitions; and about 10 predominantly Sunni blocs and parties that have defied boycott demands from Sunni clerics and insurgent groups.

The election commission, with a staff of about 900 officials and about 6,000 part-time workers across the country, is racing against time to finalize voters' lists that are based on Saddam-era lists compiled for the distribution of heavily rationed foods and medicines. Those lists have yielded a potential electorate of nearly 14 million people, but registration offices across the country are bracing for a potential tide of would-be voters seeking to make corrections in listings that Iraqi officials have said contain widespread inaccuracies, in names, places of residence and dates of birth, that could be the basis of widespread disenfranchisement.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company