IRAQ:IRAQ SUFFERED one of its worst recent days of violence yesterday when suicide bombers killed at least 57 people and wounded almost 300 others in Baghdad and Kirkuk, dashing hopes that improved security conditions would last.
The latest carnage began in the capital's Karradah district when a roadside bomb and three suicide attackers blew up in quick succession among crowds of Shia Muslim pilgrims, killing at least 32 people and wounding 102 others.
US military and Iraqi officials blamed al-Qaeda for the Baghdad attacks, with Iraqi police suggesting that the bombers were women, and thus not subject to the same rigorous body searches as men. Even so, heavy security measures were in place, with pilgrims banned from carrying weapons, bags, mobile phones, radios or any communication devices.
Television pictures showed police, firefighters and emergency workers washing blood, clearing debris and collecting pieces of flesh and body parts from the street at the scene of one blast. "I heard women and children crying and shouting and I saw burned women as dead bodies lay in pools of blood on the street," Mustapha Abdullah, a 32-year-old man who was injured in the stomach and legs, reported from hospital.
The bombings bore the hallmarks of a sectarian attack as those targeted were people taking part in a march to a Shia shrine in Kadhimiya, north of Baghdad.
On Sunday, seven pilgrims were gunned down just south of the city.
The latest attacks came after a relative lull in the sectarian violence that has ravaged Iraq since February 2006, when Sunni insurgents blew up a Shia mosque in Samarra. Violence had been at its lowest level since early 2004. As a result, the Iraqi authorities had been expecting a huge turnout, perhaps as many as a million people. In 2005, during the same pilgrimage, 1,000 people were killed in a stampede on a bridge caused by rumours of an impending suicide bomb attack.
In a separate incident yesterday, at least 25 people were killed and 185 injured in the northern city of Kirkuk at a Kurdish rally held to protest against a proposed provincial election law which has been blocked in parliament in Baghdad because of disagreements over a power-sharing formula. After the blast, gunmen began firing fired into the crowd from different directions. Police later imposed a curfew.
Kurds are worried the law will fail to address how the provincial council should be constituted.
The question is important because it could affect ownership of the northern province's oil resources, to which the Arabs and Kurds in the ethnically-mixed city say it should belong to the largely autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, but Arabs and ethnic Turkomen want it to stay under the authority of the government in Baghdad. - (Guardian service)