Day of desecration: How bombs tore apart a festival of hope

6.00pm - By JUSTIN HUGGLER in Karbala

It was the Shia's September 11: a massacre of men, women and children who tried helplessly to escape as suicide bombs exploded and mortars fell among packed crowds. Survivors scrambled desperately over the severed limbs of the dead that littered the streets.

It came on the holiest day in the Shia calendar, and millions of their fellow believers around the world watched it play out on their television screens. They watched as their holiest shrines were desecrated with the blood of the innocent.

They watched as what was supposed to be a day of liberation - the first time for years that the Ashoura ceremony, which was banned by Saddam Hussein, was allowed to take place in Iraq - ended with the streets of Karbala littered with the bodies of women and children.

At least 160 people were killed in attacks on Shia in Iraq yesterday, 85 of them in Karbala.

The images are indelible. I was 100m away from the first explosion, but you didn't have to be that close.

Millions of Shia saw that first terrifying explosion, which sent a great burst of yellow fire bellying out over the roofs of Karbala; cameras were already filming the ceremonies. You could watch it all on the television news, just like on September 11.

You didn't have to experience our fearful escape through the back streets, trying to guess which way safety lay. You could hear the screams, in your own living room. You could watch the shrapnel burst through the crowd as a mortar shell landed in the stampede.

It was not just in Karbala that the blood was shed. In Baghdad too, Shia were killed by a series of suicide bombs at a shrine.

And beyond Iraq, in the Pakistani city of Quetta, Shia were cut down as they tried to march through the streets for Ashoura. Whoever was behind these attacks planned a frontal assault on the Shia world.

On the streets of Karbala, it was terrifying. Just before the attacks the city was packed with more than 1 million Shia, here for the ritual mourning for the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, Imam Hussein.

The streets were overflowing with vast crowds: bands of young men in black ritually beating themselves with chains, Iraqis in black dishdashas, Pakistanis and Afghans in pakul caps, and Iranians in green silk scarves. (There were at least 40 Iranians among the dead yesterday.) Packed in, the crowds had nowhere to escape when all hell broke loose.

Just minutes before the first explosion, the fear crept up on us that the huge crowds were too easy a target, and we cut down a less crowded side street. The fear may have saved our lives. Moments later the first explosion went off. The pilgrims didn't stand a chance.

Later, outside the hospital, Kerim abu Ali described what had happened in that crowd. The hair on the left side of his face and his beard had been burnt by the heat of the explosion. His arm was bandaged and he had cuts all over his left side.

"Suddenly there was a huge fire in the street," he said. "I passed out. When I came round I saw dead people all around - so many dead people. I saw pieces of flesh everywhere, and heard screaming. When the ambulance came I just jumped in."

That was just the first explosion. In the minutes that followed, as we tried increasingly desperately to get out of the maze of streets, I counted eight more. It was a fearful journey.

The explosions went off all over the city centre, and nobody knew where the next would be. Many fled one explosion only to be caught in the next. At least in the back streets we could move easily. Those caught on the main streets were trapped in the crowds.

In the chaos, some Shia militiamen started shooting hopelessly at invisible assailants. As we came to the edge of the city, The Independent's driver, Mohammed, grabbed my sleeve, hissed "shooting!", and dragged me into the cover of a wall.

The first blast appears to have been from a suicide bomber who detonated his explosives outside Karbala's second shrine, that of Hussein's half-brother, Abbas. Some of the explosions that followed seem to have been mortar shells.

Yassin Dekheel, who was injured in the leg, described how he saw one of the later blasts, at the Baghdad Gate on the other side of the city centre from the first, leave the street littered with bodies.

The concept of martyrdom is at the heart of Shia belief, and whoever was behind yesterday's attacks provided plenty of new martyrs yesterday.

When we got back to Baghdad, grateful to be alive, we found that there had been a simultaneous attack at the main Shia shrine in the city's Kadhimiya quarter. Three suicide bombers set off their explosives simultaneously - two outside the shrine, and one, in an ultimate act of desecration, inside it.

"I saw a woman holding her baby in her arms; the baby was dead," one man who refused to give his name told us outside the shrine.

The assault on all that is sacred to the Shia was so absolute that it was almost mocking. The attacks could not have been more calculated to cause a rift within Iraq, and the greater Islamic world, between Sunni and Shia.

This year's vast ceremonies to mark Ashoura were about Shia power. They were part of efforts by a majority, long repressed, to reclaim what it sees as its rightful place in Iraqi society.

Many roads in Baghdad have been closed to make way for bands of men beating themselves for Ashoura in recent days, and the city has been festooned with black, red, green and yellow Shia flags.

The overt displays of power, coinciding with growing Shia demands for a lion's share in power in the new Iraq, have set nerves jangling among Iraq's Sunni minority.

But if the plan was to set Shia against Sunni, that was not the immediate effect.

The first target of Shia rage was the Americans. Angry Shia from Kadhimiya started stoning American tanks. In a disastrous public relations move, the soldiers responded with live fire and, according to unconfirmed claims, killed three bystanders.

A few accused the Americans of carrying out the attacks themselves. More blamed them for not preventing them.

"The Americans caused this by creating the security vacuum in Iraq," one angry Shia in Kadhimiya said.

"Do you really expect us to believe they cannot manage better security than this?" It was a sentiment that was echoed by the Shia's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Everybody had feared yesterday was coming. American occupation forces have been talking of stepped-up security for weeks; journalists had been debating whether to risk being on the streets of Karbala. But the security in the holy city was woefully inadequate. I got right to the city centre without being frisked, or even asked to show any identification.

Who was really behind the attacks remains unexplained. The Iraqi police said that they had caught a number of suspects, but they made similar claims after a car bomb killed 85 people in Najaf last year; no further details ever emerged.

There were fears of immediate strife between Sunni and Shia after that bombing, but the situation remained calm.

There were, however, disturbing signs of change yesterday. Private Shia militias had set up their own heavily armed roadblocks outside Karbala. Among them were the Iranian-backed Badr Brigades and the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, who has made threats of armed resistance against the Americans.

If the battle lines are being drawn for a Shia-Sunni conflict, these will be the foot soldiers.


- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq