IRAQ: Wails of lament mingled with cries for revenge yesterday as more than 100,000 Shia Muslims attended the funeral of their slain leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim at one of their religion's holiest sites.
Mourners wept and slapped their chests and heads in a traditional gesture of grief as they marched with Hakim's coffin under a blistering sun to the tomb of Imam Ali.
It was there that a car bomb killed Hakim and at least 82 others last Friday.
The mourners' cries invoked not only Hakim but also Ali and his son Hussein - both killed during the first centuries of Islam in power struggles for the leadership of Muslims, and whose fate oppressed Shias read as a parable about injustice at the hands of rulers.
"Oh Hussein, oh Hakim, may your killers perish in hell," sang a knot of young men who dripped sweat as they made their way into the holy city of Najaf, hopping from one foot to the other in time with their rhyming chant.
"God is greatest, betrayal has made its way to Hussein's father," shouted others, some waving copies of the Koran as the truck bearing Hakim's coffin - surrounded by weeping clerics in black and white turbans - approached the shrine to Ali.
The throng trailing the coffin screamed "No, no to America".
Iraqi policemen atop a traffic island used a hose to spray water on black-clad women who wept as they slapped their heads.
Friday's blast left marks in the shrine and hinted at a dangerous rift among Iraq's Shias, who make up 60 per cent of Iraq's population and who were persecuted by the Baath party toppled in the US-led war on Iraq.
The bombing was the second in a week to target a top member of his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which was nurtured by Iran's governing Shia clerics but which has worked with Iraq's US occupiers.
Rival factions have been more hostile to Washington, which is itself loath to see any support for the sort of theocratic government in place in Iran, where Hakim and other Shia clerics who Saddam Hussein sought to muzzle or kill took refuge.
The mourners - some lashing themselves with small chains, others pausing to drink from bathtubs filled with icy water along the roadside - chose to lay blame outside their ranks, echoing widespread charges that the scattered followers of Saddam were behind the bombing.
"Why didn't you do this on Friday?" screamed one man who was pulled aside and searched by the Iraqi police, who surrounded the shrine and kept cars from approaching it. "The sayyid \ and all the Muslims who died would still be alive," the man protested.
Many in the city fault Iraq's occupiers for the collapse of security they see in the Najaf bombing and the crime wave that has overwhelmed police.
"It's because the police are in charge here, and the Baathists are in charge of the police," said 34-year-old Haidar Salim.
US troops do not set foot in the shrine area, citing the religious sensibilities of Najaf's population. - (Reuters)