KERBALA, Iraq, 29 April 2007 — A suicide car bomber killed 60 people and wounded 170 near a holy Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Kerbala yesterday, an attack likely to inflame sectarian tensions. The blast occurred at a checkpoint not far from the Al-Abbas shrine, which is located among shops and restaurants in the holy city of Kerbala, 100 km southwest of Baghdad.
The area was crowded at the time, witnesses said. Television images showed a man running down a smoke-filled street holding a lifeless baby above his head. Smoke was rising off the child. Ambulances had rushed to the scene.
Salim Khadhim, a provincial health spokesman, told Reuters the blast killed 60 people and wounded 170. He said the toll could rise. “A car entered the checkpoint for the shrine and blew up in the midst of a crowd of people. Shops have been destroyed, a dozen cars caught fire,” said Jasim Najim, a shop owner nearby.
The attack bore the hallmarks of Sunni Islamist Al-Qaeda, which has sought to tip Iraq into full-scale civil war between majority Shiites and minority Sunni Arabs who were once dominant under Saddam Hussein. The US military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, on Thursday said Al-Qaeda was bent on committing what he called “sensational” attacks aimed at igniting more sectarian violence in the country.
Speaking in Washington, Petraeus said Al-Qaeda was now “probably public enemy number one” in Iraq. The Pentagon has previously called anti-American Moqtada Al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia the greatest threat to peace in Iraq.
Earlier, Sadr called US President George W. Bush the antichrist and urged him to heed calls by the opposition Democrats to withdraw from the chaos of Iraq. Sadr, whose ministers quit Shiite Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s government this month, renewed his demand for a US pullout a day after Bush pledged to veto legislation that would require US troops to begin leaving Iraq by Oct. 1.
Calling Bush “the greatest evil,” Sadr said in a letter read out by a Sadrist MP in Parliament that an eventual US pullout would be a “victory for the Iraqi people.” “Here are the Democrats demanding that you withdraw at least with a timetable and you are stubborn against them,” said Sadr.
Meanwhile, US forces detained 17 suspected insurgents in raids targeting Al-Qaeda in Iraq yesterday, the military said, a day after the Pentagon announced the capture of one of the terror network’s most senior and experienced operatives. Elsewhere, US forces used fighter jets to destroy a truck bomb discovered in Anbar province, and conducted a raid south of Baghdad that netted weapons that insurgents apparently had imported from neighboring Iran, the military said yesterday.
US and Iraqi officials in Baghdad declined to comment about Abdul Hadi Al-Iraqi, 46, who was captured last fall on his way to Iraq, where he may have been sent by top terror leaders in Pakistan to take a senior position in Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
