MULTIPLE bomb attacks on Shias in Baghdad yesterday killed at least 36 people and fuelled sectarian tensions on Iraq’s bloodiest day since the elections.
The victims died in suicide bomb and mortar attacks as the country’s long-oppressed majority prepared to celebrate simultaneously their holiest festival and their imminent ascent to power.
One suicide bomber wearing an explosive jacket killed at least 15 people at the Shia al-Khadimain mosque in the predominantly Sunni area of Doura, police said. Another bomber at al-Bayaa mosque in west Baghdad killed ten people.
A third suicide bomber attacked a police checkpoint in Baghdad, killing at least one policeman. A fourth bomber killed two people in north Baghdad on a procession to mark the festival of Ashoura.
Even as the blast echoed around the capital — a year after more than 170 Shias were killed at the same festival in Karbala and Baghdad — Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a powerful Shia cleric, delivered an incendiary sermon at another mosque.
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Blaming Baathists in the security forces for the murders of three members of his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest party in the Shia-led coalition soon to rule the country, he castigated the Government of Iyad Allawi, the Prime Minister, for failing to remove former regime loyalists from power.
“We warned many times of the dangers of bringing back killers and criminals to the institutions of government, but those concerned did not listen to our warnings and did not take them seriously,” he told the congregation. As he spoke, hundreds of thousands were preparing to march south to Karbala under black flags.
“I think this is an organised operation to plant the seeds of hatred between the Sunnis and the Shia and to reach civil war,” Riadh al-Sultani, a 35-year-old worshipper, said in one of the bombed mosques. The top Shia parties — especially the Islamic factions and Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress — are advocates of intensifying the controversial “de-Baathification” programme launched by Paul Bremer, the former US administrator in Iraq.
Shias and Kurds intent on punishing Baathists who killed their followers had demanded the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and widespread exclusion of Sunnis from government. But the programme has been blamed for fuelling the insurgency by throwing thousands of Iraq’s trained, armed, embittered and wealthy ruling elite on to the scrapheap.
The outgoing Dr Allawi, a Shia and former Baathist, eased the policy, hoping to woo Sunnis from violence. “We cannot afford in this country, for now, to go on a route different to that of national unity,” he said this week. “It will throw the country into problems, severe problems.”
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Western diplomats are also concerned, noting a lack of “concrete” initiatives behind Shia assurances that they will engage Sunnis in the new Iraqi order. A US official said that it would be hard to engage Sunnis and purge Baathists simultaneously.
The violence continued last night when seven people were killed and ten wounded when a suicide bomber struck a Shia mosque in al-Iskandariyah, 35 miles (60km) south of Bagdhad.