Bombers Strike Shiite Mosques in Baghdad on Eve of Holy Day

Suicide bombers, some wearing difficult-to-detect explosive vests, struck two crowded Baghdad mosques and other targets Friday on the eve of the Shiite Muslim holy day of Ashura, killing nearly 30 people and wounding dozens.

A car bombing and other violence took 10 more lives amid rising sectarian rhetoric and uncertainty about who will lead the country’s next government.

Officials braced for more violence in the next 24 hours and imposed tight control over the city of Karbala as tens of thousands of Shiite pilgrims walked to a shrine there to mark Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad.

Last year on the holiday, bombs in Karbala and Baghdad killed as many as 200 people, believed to be the highest one-day death toll since the ouster of President Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

The attackers then, as well as on Friday, were thought to be Sunni Muslim militants who consider the Shiite branch of Islam an apostasy and are trying to stop the Shiite majority from taking control of the government for the first time in Iraq’s modern history.

In the country’s landmark election Jan. 30, a Shiite Islamist electoral slate garnered 48% of the vote and a narrow parliamentary majority. This weekend, its leaders are debating over whom they will seek to install as prime minister. A decision is expected in a few days.

Ibrahim Jafari, the leader of the Islamic Dawa Party, is considered the front-runner, vying for the post against veteran politician Ahmad Chalabi. Diplomats here said no one could predict who would prevail.

Both Jafari and Chalabi strongly support a campaign to purge the government and the new security forces of unrepentant former members of the Baath Party, the Sunni-led group that held Iraq in an iron grip during Hussein’s rule, along with secret supporters of the insurgency.

The anti-Baathist calls provoke fear among Sunnis, who believe they will be targeted unfairly and become even more marginalized in a nation they controlled under Hussein and his predecessors.

At a briefing by U.S. officials who coordinate government contract work here, there were warnings of a probable increase in tensions between Shiites and Sunnis during the holiday period, which ends today. A security contractor with access to U.S. military reports said Shiite mobs had attacked suspected suicide bombers three times in the last few days. On Thursday, a group of Shiites participating in a march beat to death a passerby who appeared suspicious to them.

Shiites “are taking the law into their own hands,” the contractor said.

Friday’s blasts at the mosques in Baghdad occurred shortly after noon, as worshipers gathered for the main prayers of the week. In the first bombing, the crowd was entering Abul-Cheer Mosque in the Doura section of town when security guards noticed a man whose appearance and gait raised alarm.

“Some of my friends and I were standing outside the mosque and witnessed a suspicious-looking man with a beard entering the mosque,” said Ali Abdul Sattar, 32. “We tried to catch up to him and detain him, but he exploded himself amid the worshipers, killing my brother in the process.”

Iraqi police Lt. Col. Abdul-Kareem Shummari, chief of the station that oversees the neighborhood of the mosque, said the bomber used an explosive vest. The blast killed 15 people and 30 were hurt, he said.

“Whoever it was must have been thoroughly brainwashed to have done such an operation,” Shummari said.

At Ali Bayaa Mosque, in the Bayaa district of Baghdad, the situation was similar, but guards stopped the bomber before he was able to disappear into the crowd. Subsequent news reports here indicated that 10 people were killed.

Less than an hour later, according to a police lieutenant quoted by Associated Press, a procession of pilgrims in northwestern Baghdad was hit by another bomb, this one killing two people and injuring five. And on Friday evening, according to AP, a car bomb exploded outside a Shiite mosque in Iskandariya, 30 miles south of the capital, killing seven people and wounding 10.

Shiite passions have also been heightened by the discovery in Baghdad of three bodies of members of the Badr Brigades, a Shiite militia. They apparently had been tortured.

South of the capital, unidentified gunmen assassinated two grown sons of the Najaf police chief, Gen. Ghalib Jazaari, who said during a news conference that the bodies had been discovered near Karbala, bound and riddled with bullets. The sons were police lieutenants and had been working to protect pilgrims walking to the Karbala shrines.

North of Baghdad in Mosul, at least four mortar shells targeting a regional police headquarters landed in the street, killing a 15-year-old boy and injuring three civilians.

Officials reported that three U.S. soldiers were killed in separate incidents by improvised explosive devices. One died Friday during a patrol near Balad, north of Baghdad, and another died north of Diwaniya on Friday, near the Iranian border. The third death occurred late Thursday near Tall Afar, west of Mosul. The troops’ names were withheld pending notification of relatives.

During a sermon Friday at Umm Qura Mosque in Baghdad, a leading Sunni sheik, Ahmad Abdul-Ghafoor Samarrai, warned Shiites against unjustly arresting Sunnis, saying that about 300 people were being held in the city of Hillah.

“These people are innocent and have been arrested for misdeeds done by others,” he said.

At a prominent Shiite mosque in Baghdad, prayer leader Jalal Deen Sageer condemned recent policies by the U.S.-appointed interim government, which he claimed had “allowed Baathists back in to hold official positions, especially in the security field.”

He urged a new program of rapid de-Baathification. The next government must “purify the system.... We don’t want to see the return of the deeds of the Mukhabarat,” he said, referring to Hussein’s notorious security service. “High-ranking officers in the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior are already back. They are committing crimes against us again.”

The comments appeared directed at outgoing interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who has tried to bring some former Baathists into the government to soothe Sunni emotions but on the condition that they had not committed criminal acts and had renounced the policies of Hussein.

Last year’s bloodshed on Ashura marked the first large-scale attacks by suicide bombers using vests lined with explosives. Since then the tactic has been used repeatedly, including on Jan. 30, when at least four vest-wearing bombers attacked polling places.

Last year, up to a dozen bombers wearing suicide vests struck in coordinated fashion at two holy sites -- near the shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas in Karbala and at the Kadhimiya shrine in Baghdad.

At both sites, tens of thousands of worshipers had gathered. Groups of men beat themselves ritually with chains, and others cut themselves on their heads with swords in a bloody spectacle of devotion.

The suicide bombers, facing little security, inserted themselves among the celebrating Shiites and detonated their weapons, causing horrific scenes of carnage and panic.

Initial reports indicated that last year’s attacks involved mortar rounds. But inspection of the sites afterward revealed ball bearings and other shrapnel carried in the vests.

In Karbala, authorities said afterward, nine suicide bombers had detonated themselves, killing about 130 people.

Up to half the victims were believed to be Iranians, who were ecstatic to have finally visited the shrines.

Hussein’s regime, a rival of Iran, limited the entry of Iranian Shiite pilgrims and watched them closely. As many as 70 were killed in Kadhimiya during the holy week last year, although authorities never clarified the exact number.

As many as three bombers struck the Baghdad shrine, authorities said, possibly including a woman who managed to get inside the shrine without being searched.

Authorities immediately blamed foreign Sunni radicals for the attacks, pointing the finger at Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi’s organization. A website associated with the group later claimed credit for the attack.

This year, Iraqi authorities have closed the borders from Thursday to Tuesday, excluding Shiite pilgrims from Iran to better control the size of the crowds and keep out other foreigners who might intend to carry out attacks. Security was beefed up in anticipation of the event.

Shiite militiamen were posted along the entrances to Karbala and Kadhimiya, cooperating with Iraqi police and the national guard.

Visitors were being stopped every few blocks and asked to show identification and submit to searches.

The guards said they belonged to “popular committees” authorized by Iraq’s senior Shiite clerics.

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Times staff writer T. Christian Miller in Baghdad and special correspondents Suhail Affan and Said Rifai of The Times’ Baghdad Bureau, Saad Fakhrildeen in Karbala, Saad Sadiq in Najaf and Roaa Ahmed in Mosul contributed to this report.