A string of attacks against Shiite pilgrims in the past three days killed 68 people in Baghdad, security officials said yesterday, exposing the continued ability of insurgents to inflict bloodshed.
The death toll was another blow to the leaders of a country that remains dogged by sectarian strife and has only a caretaker government more than four months after a general election in which no clear winner emerged.
Almost half of those killed — 28 — died on Wednesday night when a suicide bomber wearing an explosives-filled belt struck pilgrims in Adhamiyah, a Sunni district across the Tigris river from Kadhimiyah, in the north of the capital.
Kadhimiyah is named after Musa Kadhim, the seventh of 12 revered imams in Shiite Islam, who was poisoned in 799AD, and whose death the pilgrims have honored in recent days.
Many of the faithful cross a bridge between the two neighboring districts to reach the shrine. The suicide bomber also wounded 136 people, while 11 more were killed in other bomb attacks across the capital on Wednesday.
The new death toll issued yesterday came as tens of thousands of Shiite faithful started to disperse from the shrine and make their way home amid chaotic scenes as many of them looked for a lift from passing cars and buses.
Four bombings in the capital yesterday killed nine people and brought the number of wounded to more than 400 people since Tuesday, the officials said.
A roadside bomb in the central Bab al-Muazam neighborhood killed four people and wounded 46, while a second bomb in the southeastern Mashtal district killed three and wounded 31, a security official said.
The Shiite majority in Iraq have been a main target of Sunni Arab armed groups since the US-led invasion of 2003 toppled Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime.
Pilgrimages to the Shiite holy places have been repeatedly hit.
Tens of thousands of Shiite worshippers streamed into Baghdad in recent days amid heavy security for the pilgrimage.
Traffic was banned on Tuesday on several bridges spanning the Tigris River, increasing already serious congestion in the capital, where control on vehicles is complicated by hundreds of security checkpoints.
Motorcycles and carts were also prohibited, but even heightened measures failed to protect them as they traveled to the mausoleum, which had previously been targeted.
In April last year, two female suicide bombers detonated their payloads near the shrine, killing 65 people, including 20 Iranian pilgrims, and wounding 120 others.
However, the threat of violence did not dent the enthusiasm of worshippers, some of whom were planning to pray for a breakthrough in the political deadlock that has blocked a new government taking office after March 7 parliamentary polls.
Iyad Allawi, a Shiite former prime minister, insists that as the election’s narrow victor he should become prime minister, especially as his broadly secular Iraqiya coalition had strong backing in Sunni-dominated provinces.
He has warned that a failure to see Sunni Arab voters properly represented in power could reignite the sectarian violence that saw tens of thousands killed in the years following the ouster of Hussein.
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