Massed Shiite pilgrims risk more death in Iraq

The Muslim pilgrims’ road to the holy city of Karbala became a highway of bullets and bombs for Shiites yesterday. Drive-by shootings and roadside and bus bombs killed or wounded 19 people, ratcheting up the sectarian tensions gripping Iraq.

Security forces, including US armoured reinforcements, girded for more bloodshed leading up to Monday’s Shiite holiday. And north of Baghdad, in the Sunni Triangle, a two-day-old operation involving 1,500 US and Iraqi troops swept through an area near Samarra in search of insurgents.

It was in Samarra that the insurgent bombing of a Shiite shrine last month ignited days of violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. More than 500 people died.

Authorities had feared new attacks as tens of thousands of Shiites, many dressed in black and carrying religious banners, converge on Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometres south of the capital, for Monday’s 40th and final day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson.

The US military announced this week it was dispatching a fresh battalion of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armoured Division, about 700 troops, to Iraq from its base in Kuwait to provide extra security for Shiite holy cities and Baghdad during this period.

Yesterday’s bloodshed in Baghdad began as groups of faithful, many of them parents with children in tow, trekked down city streets headed for the southbound highway to Karbala.

At about 7.30am, a BMW car driving alongside pilgrims in the western district of Adil opened fire, killing three young men and wounding two other people, police Lt. Thair Mahmoud said. Police later reported a second shooting, also in western Baghdad, in which men riding in a car fired on pilgrims near Um al-Tuboul Square, wounding three.

About midday, a bomb left in a plastic bag of vegetables exploded on a minibus, killing two passengers and wounding four in a Shiite district of Baghdad, police reported. Later in the day, a roadside bomb went off as a crowd of pilgrims passed in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, wounding five people.

Elsewhere, police in a Shiite area of east Baghdad late on Thursday found the bodies of four Sunni men who had been seized from a taxi by masked gunmen the day before in western Baghdad. And police reported that six mortar rounds landed on six houses yesterday in a mixed Sunni-Shiite area of Khan Bani Saad, 10 miles (16 kilometres) north of Baghdad, killing one person and wounding three.

In the western city of Ramadi, US forces again exchanged fire with attackers. The clashes between US troops and insurgents began about 6:30pm yesterday around the US base at the provincial government headquarters, according to a doctor at Ramadi hospital, Dheya al-Duleimi. He had no immediate information on casualties.

Iraqi troops killed one attacker in a firefight with insurgents in nearby Fallujah, police Lt. Omer Ahmed reported.

In the big helicopter-borne operation north of Baghdad, only light resistance was reported as some 1,500 troops from the US 101st Airborne Division and Iraq’s 4th Division swept through a 100-square-mile (256-square-kilometre) area in search of insurgents and weapons.

Lt. Col. Edward Loomis, 101st Airborne Division spokesman, said about 40 suspects were detained, 10 of whom were later released, and six weapons caches were found.

The only casualty reported was a 101st Airborne soldier shot and killed on Thursday while manning an observation post in Samarra. At least 2,312 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.