attacks in recent memory, while dozens more died in bombings that rocked Pakistan, several reports said. United States officials claimed the Al-Qaeda network, blamed for the September 11 attacks, was involved in the Iraq attacks.
The bloodshed came a day before Members of the Iraqi Governing Council were due to present a draft constitution that would establish Islam as "a source" for the country, while also guaranteeing religious freedom for minorities, including Christians.
Hardliners have repeatedly said they want Iraq to become an Islamic state, and Tuesday’s attacks in Iraq were seen as an attempt to destabilize the region and undermine United States-led efforts in the region.
Reporters in Iraq said multiple explosions tore through crowds of Shi’ite worshipers celebrating the last day of the Shura holiday outside two major Shiite shrines in Baghdad and what they regard as their "holy city" of Karbala. Ashura marks the death in battle almost 1,300 years ago of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, and this was the first time pilgrims openly observed the holiday since the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein last year.
AMBULANCES RUSH
"Ambulances rushed to the shrine in Baghdad as religious clerics called for calm over loudspeakers and appealed for blood donations for the injured" said Voice of America (VOA) Correspondent Laurie Kassman in Baghdad.
Saad al-Kabi, 38, told VOA he was still shaking from the shock. "I was walking toward the mosque to pray just before 10 in the morning when an explosion ripped through a crowd of women in front of the shrine. It was so awful with body parts and blood everywhere." As relief workers and volunteers evacuated the injured in Baghdad, groups of worshippers reportedly began marching in the street in front of the shrine chanting, "we are not afraid of death," news reports said.
"This was a clear and tragically well-organized act of terrorism," the Bloomberg news agency quoted Dan Senor, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq as saying in Baghdad. Meanwhile in Quetta, Pakistan, reporters quoted hospital sources as saying that over 40 Shiites were killed and more than 160 wounded in a bomb blast and gun assault near the troubled city. City officials imposed a curfew as the assailants were sought.
A Shi’ite Governing Council member, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, blamed the Iraq attacks on 38-year old Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom Washington suspects of working for the al Qaeda network. The U.S. military last month made public a letter it said was written by Zarqawi that described a plan to provoke a war within four months between Iraq’s Sunni Muslims and the majority Shiites.
WORLD LEADERS REACT
World leaders and Arab countries condemned the attacks. In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair talked of a "struggle between good and evil" in Iraq since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
Blair stressed that the purpose of the attacks was "to try and set the different religious communities in Iraq against each other, to destroy the progress in Iraq, and cause the maximum amount of dissent, division and hatred, when the vast majority of people in Iraq want to build an Iraq that is stable and free and prosperous and democratic for the future".
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary of the U.K., said earlier that he thought the attacks were timed to send a message against Iraqi unity. "They sadly represent a continued attempt by rejectionist terrorists to promote civil strife," Straw was quoted as saying.
AMERICAN SOLDIERS CRITICIZED
However in Beirut, Lebanon, a spokesman for Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, told reporters that American soldiers were to blame for the attacks as they were responsible for the security. Sheikh Hamed Khafaf reportedly said that U.S. officials had ignored repeated requests to bolster security for the pilgrims.
The latest attacks were expected to make it more difficult to carry out the terms of the interim constitution. The chairman of a federal panel that monitors religious freedom around the globe told the Associated Baptist Press (ABP) this week that it was too early to express optimism or concern about the new document.
"The rub in all these things is…what does the translation really look like?" said Young, dean of the George Washington University Law School. Young’s commission has previously expressed serious concerns about the status of religious freedom in Afghanistan’s draft constitution.
Commissioners have worried that document goes too far in enshrining Islamic law and does not do enough to ensure an independent judiciary’s ability to interpret those protections. Iraq could undergo similar problems as it drafts a permanent constitution, ABP reported. "In light of that, Iraq’s draft constitution "could be problematic — it could be the kinds of things we’re worried about," Young told ABP.
