Suicide bombers target pilgrims

SUICIDE bombers targeted Shi’ite pilgrims in the south and police recruits in central Iraq, while a roadside bomb killed five US soldiers, bringing the death toll to at least 130 people in a series of attacks.

The two-day toll from insurgent attacks rose to 183, reflecting a dramatic upsurge in bloodshed following the December 15 parliamentary elections.

Some leading Sunni politicians accused the Shi’ite-led government of condoning fraud in the voting.

Iraq’s prime minister denounced the violence as an attempt to derail the political process at a time when progress was being made toward including the Sunnis in a new, broad-based government and thereby weakening the Sunni-led insurgency.

But Iraq’s largest Shi’ite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), blamed Sunni Arab groups that fared poorly in the elections for inciting the violence.

SCIRI warned that Shi’ite patience was wearing thin and accused the US-led coalition forces of restraining the Iraqi army and its police forces.

Yesterday’s death toll is the largest single-day total since September 29, when 162 died, and one of the bloodiest days in the three-year insurgency.

A suicide blast near the Imam Hussein shrine in the Shi’ite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, killed 63 people and wounded 120.

The bomber appeared to have blown himself up about 30 yards from the shrine in a busy pedestrian area surrounded by shops.

Five US soldiers were killed when a convoy heading for Karbala was attacked 15 miles south of the city.

Karbala has been relatively free of violence since December 2004, when seven people were killed and 31 wounded in an attack. But the deadliest civilian attack in Iraq since the war began happened on March 2, 2004, in Karbala, when co-ordinated blasts from suicide bombers, mortars and planted explosives exploded near Muslim shrines, killing at least 181 people.

On Wednesday, a suicide bomber struck a funeral for a Shi’ite politician’s nephew, killing at least 32 mourners, wounding dozens and splattering tombstones with blood. The attack in Muqdadiyah, 60 miles north of Baghdad, bore hallmarks of Islamic extremist groups.

In Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold 70 miles west of Baghdad, 56 people were reported killed and 60 injured when a suicide bomber attacked a line of about 1,000 police recruits.

In other violence, a suicide car bomb killed three Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad and gunmen killed three people in separate incidents, raising the death toll to at least 130.

The Karbala bomber detonated a vest stuffed with about 18 pounds of explosives and several hand grenades, officials said. Small steel balls that had been packed into the suicide vest were found at the site, as was one unexploded grenade, he said.

A senior official in the Iraqi Accordance Movement, the main minority Sunni coalition, denounced the violence and called for solidarity among Iraqis to defeat it, but he blamed the government for allowing it to happen.

SCIRI, a partner in the governing coalition, said the attacks were part of a plot “to eliminate the Shi’ites in Iraq”.