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KERBALA - Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have fled Iraq's holy city of Kerbala after a day of fierce gunbattles near two of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines killed 52 people during an annual religious rite.
Sporadic and occasionally sustained gunfire could still be heard after dawn in the city, coming from the area around the shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas.
Sirens of police cars and ambulances could be heard wailing throughout the city and police loudspeakers ordered pilgrims out of the ancient centre.
Police sources said Iraqi police and soldiers had seized control of the city centre from the shrine's guards.
Fighting, apparently among Shi'ite factions in the holy city, killed 52 people and wounded 206 on Tuesday, a senior security official in Baghdad said.
The general director of the al-Hussein hospital in Kerbala, 110km south of the capital, said it had received 34 bodies and treated 239 wounded.
Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims had gathered to commemorate the 9th century birth of Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi, the last of 12 imams that Shiites revere as saints.
The pilgrimage, like other annual rites, had become a show of force for a Shi'ite community repressed under former leader Saddam Hussein.
The fighting also spread to Baghdad, where police said at least five people were killed in clashes between rival Shi'ite militia overnight. By morning, some streets were closed in what appeared to be a partial curfew in the capital.
Police dragged razor wire barricades across Baghdad's Jumhuriya Bridge, one of the main bridges across the Tigris River.
Buses returning from the south were packed with pilgrims, some clinging to the roofs.
Tuesday's battles appeared to pit the country's two largest Shi'ite groups against each other - followers of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia, and the rival Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), whose Badr Organisation controls police forces in much of the Shi'ite south.
The two powerful factions have increasingly clashed throughout the Shi'ite south, areas where US forces have little or no presence.
The Iraqi government said on Tuesday it was rushing two brigades of troops to Kerbala to impose calm. US forces, with no presence on the ground there, flew overhead in jets in what a spokeswoman called a "show of force".
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said his troops had restored calm to the city and blamed "outlawed armed criminal gangs from the remnants of the buried Saddam regime" for the violence.
"The situation in Kerbala is under control after military reinforcements arrived and police and military special forces have spread throughout the city to purge those killers and criminals," he said in a statement.
One of Sadr's senior aides, Ahmed al-Shaibani, said Sadr had called for calm among his followers and blamed the shrine guards for provoking the army and police.
During Tuesday's clashes, a Reuters witness saw gunmen roaming the streets armed with heavy machineguns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, batons and swords, beating pilgrims, including women.
Washington's 160,000 troops in Iraq have focused mainly on Sunni Arab and mixed areas of the country to defeat Sunni Arab insurgents and stamp out sectarian violence. But the prospect of war between Shi'ite factions for control of the south is seen as a separate, growing threat to the country's stability.
Two governors of southern provinces, both members of SIIC, have been assassinated this month. In the biggest city in the south, the country's main oil centre of Basra, British forces are expected to withdraw soon and Shi'ite factions are fighting for control.
- REUTERS
