Insurgents Kill 140 as Iraq Clashes Escalate

Photos
Two Days of Carnage Shake Iraq
Suicide bombers carried out twin assaults Thursday on one of Shiite Islam's most sacred sites and a police recruitment center, killing at least 130 people and wounding hundreds.

Though U.S. and Iraqi authorities have been reluctant to allow this, on the grounds that locally recruited soldiers are vulnerable to coercion by insurgents, they have relented in recent weeks. Pool said in the statement that since recruiting began Monday, recruiters have screened 600 applicants who met basic requirements to join the police.

The Ramadi residents responded to the attack with fury. Nearly everyone at the scene said they believed it had been ordered by Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq, considered the most ruthless and best-organized faction in the insurgent movement.

"People in this city helped Zarqawi a lot, and I hope this would make them change their minds," said Saad Abid Ali, a captain in the Iraqi army hit by shrapnel in the legs.

Another group of people beat a doctor in the hospital after he told an Iraqi journalist that U.S. forces were to blame for the attacks.

The scene was equally grim in Karbala, where another bomber wearing explosives detonated himself about 30 yards from the Imam Hussein shrine. Many of the victims were Shiite pilgrims who had gathered outside the Zainabiya gate to the shrine, an area flanked by first-floor markets and second- and third-story hotels.

A hospital assistant, Mithaa Karim Jafar, said 54 people had been killed and 143 wounded. Eight of the dead were Shiite pilgrims from Iran, Jafar said.

Footage on Iraqi television showed police in the city center shouting and waving pistols and assault rifles in an effort to control a crowd of onlookers. The ground appeared to be wet, and lumps of clothing and flesh lay scattered across the bloodstained street. Police and emergency workers loaded bodies onto wooden carts and pushed them away. The al-Iraqiya television network showed a pickup truck pulling away from the scene, black body bags piled in its bed.

The street was calm again by the time a Washington Post special correspondent arrived on the scene. It had been cleared and guards stood watch over the shrine, which honors the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad and one of the founding figures of Shiite Islam. The mosque, surrounded by high walls of green stone and topped by a golden dome, was intact.

The chaos moved to the city's hospital, where doctors worked to save the lives of the wounded and make an accounting of the dead. More than 150 people, many crying, jostled for a glance at a list of names of people killed in the attack. Bodies lay in a row in the hospital's garden, and more dead lay inside an overcrowded morgue.

Among the victims was a 3-year-old boy hit in the head by shrapnel. His relatives surrounded the white cloth sack wrapping his body and wailed, beating their faces.

Sarhan reported from Karbala. Special correspondents Hassan Shammari in Baqubah and Omar Fekeiki, Naseer Nouri and K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad contributed to this report.