125 killed in Iraq shrine attacks

At least 125 people were killed and hundreds were wounded in attacks on Shiite shrines in Baghdad and the southern city of Karbala today, Iraq’s Governing Council said.

The blasts in Karbala killed 50 to 60 people, said Adel Abdel-Mahdi, a senior member of a Shiite political party represented on the council.

The simultaneous bombings at Baghdad’s Kazimiya shrine killed at least 75 people, he said.

Hundreds were wounded in both cities.

Abdel-Mahdi, speaking at a press conference with other representatives from the council, said the Baghdad blasts were believed to have been caused by bombs, possibly planted or carried by suicide attackers.

The Karbala blasts, he added, were believed caused by mortar shells.

Council member Mouafak al-Rubaie said there were Iranians among those killed in Karbala, but gave no exact figures.

The attacks in the two cities took place as tens of thousands of Shiite pilgrims gathered for Ashoura, the holiest day in the Shiite religious calendar.

The attacks sparked a wave of Shiite outrage – much of it directed at US troops in the Iraqi capital.

Iraqis attacked US Army medics trying to help wounded. Throwing stones, the Iraqis chased the US troops back into their high-walled compound near the blast area then tried to storm the gates.

Soldiers threw smoke grenades and fired shotguns into the air to drive the mob off.

Two soldiers suffered broken bones when a crowd pelted their Humvees with a hail of stones outside the Kazimiya shrine.

In Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, five large blasts went off shortly after 10am near the golden-domed shrine of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam’s most beloved saints, and another shrine. The explosions hurled bodies in all directions and sending crowds of pilgrims fleeing in panic.

Dead and wounded were loaded on to wooden carts normally used to ferry elderly pilgrims to holy sites. Bodies ripped apart by the force of the blasts lay on the streets.

At about the same time, three explosions rocked the inside and outside of the Kazimiya shrine in Baghdad, which contains the tombs of two other saints, Imam Mousa Kazem and his grandson Imam Muhammad al-Jawad.

Panicked men and women, dressed in black, fled screaming and weeping as ambulances raced to the scene.

The Ashoura festival, which marks the killing of Hussein in a 7th century battle, is the most important religious period in Shiite Islam and draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and other Shiite communities to the Iraqi shrines.