BAGHDAD, Feb. 18 -- A religious rite of mourning and penitence turned into a day of bloodshed Friday as suicide bombers mingling with Shiite Muslim worshipers and insurgents firing mortars and staging ambushes killed at least 30 people.
The attacks in and around Baghdad, like similar violence in recent weeks and months, appeared intended to inflame sectarian divisions among Iraqis. But Shiites defied the bombs and surged back into their mosques, vowing not to retaliate. At the same time, they braced for more violence Saturday, the height of the Shiites' observance of Ashura, a day on which bombs across Iraq killed more than 170 people last year.
Aqil, who gave only his first name, cries on his brother's coffin at Yarmouk Hospital after a suicide bombing at a mosque in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad. Other attacks occurred at mosques in and near Baghdad.
(Mohammed Uraibi -- AP)
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"Whoever is trying to do this wants to create civil war," Ali Hussein, 39, a laborer, said at the site of one of the blasts. "They couldn't stop the elections. They know if a civil war will start, no one will be able to stop it."
The violence rocked a country still forming a new government -- one that will be led by Iraq's long-oppressed Shiite majority. Negotiations among political parties over who will be the next prime minister have failed to produce agreement, and there were signs that the wait was aggravating tension between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
During Friday prayers at a mosque in central Baghdad, a senior figure in the Shiite coalition that won the most votes in the Jan. 30 parliamentary elections bluntly warned of retaliation against officials who worked with the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein.
"We're going to assume power in a government that is a wreck," said Jalaleddin Saghir, the prayer leader at the Bratha mosque. "Our society suffered from many problems . . . after the criminals of the Baath Party returned to the security apparatus. There is a necessity of purifying the security apparatus. Do not expect us to practice our work with transparency."
The very smell on the streets of Baghdad on Friday underscored the newly public importance of religion in Iraq, which was officially secular for most of Hussein's reign. Shiites slaughtered sheep and cows and stirred the meat into huge pots of stew to feed neighbors, an Ashura tradition outlawed by Hussein.
"During the former regime, we couldn't do this," said Ali Yasari, 50, a merchant, directing his large family as they stirred the stew. The attacks Friday, he said, "are the tax we have to pay to achieve democracy and freedom."
The first blast occurred as prayers began in a mosque in Dora, a working-class neighborhood of Shiites and Sunnis in south Baghdad.
"A suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt came in and mixed with the guards who were searching the people who came to worship," said Iraqi army Sgt. Arias Hashim. When challenged, the bomber detonated a vest packed with explosives.
Inside the mosque, a new sanctuary built after Hussein's fall, Anjad Sabah, 28, said he was listening to the preacher when the explosion jolted the congregation. "I went out immediately. I found people thrown here and there, covered with blood," Sabah said. "I even found children on the ground, wounded. I pulled some of them out and put them in the first car I found and told them to go to the hospital."
Dead and wounded were taken to Yarmouk Hospital, where taxi driver Ammar Faris, 29, later described the blast.
"I came to the prayer late. I was parking my car in front of the mosque, but before I switched it off, the explosion happened," said Faris, wan and breathing shallowly under a blanket that covered shrapnel wounds in his chest. "I didn't feel anything. I knew only that a crowd of people were carrying me, and then I found myself in the hospital."
Hospital officials said 15 people were killed and 34 wounded in the attack.
