BAGHDAD, April 7: Three suicide bombers, two of them disguised as women, killed on Friday at least 79 people and wounded 164 as worshippers left a popular Baghdad Shia mosque after Friday prayers, in the second major attack on Iraq’s majority community in as many days.
The blasts took place outside northern Baghdad’s Baratha mosque where the imam, Sheikh Jalaluddin al-Saghir, is an MP with the Shia United Iraqi Alliance, the largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament.
Immediately after the attack, Iraqi authorities appealed on state television for blood donations. The channel announced 79 people had been killed and another 164 wounded in the blasts.
“At least two of the bombers were dressed as women and blew themselves up inside the mosque complex,” a security official told AFP.
An AFP photographer at the scene said “a woman dressed in a traditional abaya (head-to-toe robe) blew herself up at the entrance of the mosque as worshippers were stepping out.”
Saghir said he believed that one of the bombers blew himself up by the security post at the mosque’s female section, causing a panic which allowed “the two other terrorists to penetrate the mosque.”
Saghir added that one of the other two bombers “went towards my private office and one was in the mosque’s main prayer hall and they blew themselves up amid the crowds.”
Saghir’s mosque packs thousands of worshippers every Friday. The cleric is known for his fiery sermons promulgating the rights of Iraq’s Shia majority.
“This is a filthy war against the Shias,” Saghir told the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite channel.
He blamed newspapers close to Iraq’s ousted Sunni elite for provoking the attack by waging “a campaign defaming our mosque, saying that some Sunnis were detained in the mosque.”
Iraqi and US military forces quickly cordoned off the entire area as dozens of pick-up trucks, ambulances and private vehicles started to ferry the victims to hospitals.
Victims were also carried away in handcarts and blankets, as men, beating their chests in grief, searched for relatives who had attended the prayers at the mosque.
Patches of blood and dozens of shoes were left scattered outside the mosque where the bombers blew themselves up in the midst of the fleeing worshippers.
US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad called upon Iraqis “to resist the provocation to sectarian violence.”
“I urge all Iraqis to exercise restraint in the wake of this tragedy, to come together to fight terror, to continue to resist the provocation to sectarian violence... ,” he said in a statement.
The triple attack followed a car bombing on Thursday that killed 10 people in the holy city of Najaf and came amid political deadlock as Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari refused pressure to step down.
The latest bombings evoked the February 22 bombing of a Shia shrine in the northern town of Samarra that triggered Shia reprisals against Sunnis across Iraq.
Hundreds died in the ensuing tit-for-tat killings between the two religious groups, raising fears of civil war.
In Thursday’s attack in Najaf, a car bomb exploded close to the revered Imam Ali (RA) shrine and near the offices of senior cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
In his Friday sermon, Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr blamed the US forces for Thursday’s Najaf bombing.
“This is not the first time that the occupation forces and their death squads have resorted to killings,” the cleric said referring to the Najaf bombing.
Sadr also blamed the US-led coalition forces for Iraq’s recent wave of communal violence, charging that the United States was “killing religious Shia clerics in order to start a sectarian strife”.—AFP
