Three Blasts Kill 79 in Main Baghdad Mosque
Shiites Are Attacked at End of Prayers

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 8, 2006

BAGHDAD, April 7 -- Suicide bombers stalked through the leading Shiite Muslim mosque in Baghdad on Friday, setting off explosions that killed some worshipers as they streamed out after prayers and others as they surged back inside for safety, witnesses and police said.

As many as 79 people died in the three blasts that ripped through hundreds of faithful at the Baratha mosque, the Baghdad religious center for the biggest Shiite religious party in Iraq's governing coalition.

In an intensifying 1 1/2 -month-old campaign of violence targeting Shiite shrines, Friday's attack was the second in as many days at a mosque associated with one of Iraq's governing Shiite religious parties, which rule Iraq through the loyalty of the Shiite majority and the parties' armed militias. On Thursday, a car bombing near the Imam Ali mosque in the southern city of Najaf killed at least 13 people.

The Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the largely Sunni Arab city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, has touched off Iraq's worst sectarian violence since U.S. forces invaded three years ago.

"The ground was all flesh and blood," said Abbas Talib, 53, a gas station attendant who rushed into the Baratha mosque after Friday's blasts. His blue jumpsuit and hands were soaked with the blood of the people he had carried out.

"I saw the bodies and blood covering the walls and ground. Many people died inside," said Talib, who said he brought out 12 bleeding bodies without pausing to see if they were dead or alive. "Many died."

Baghdad had been on high alert amid rumors that car bombers were roaming the streets Friday looking for targets.

At the Baratha mosque, affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, security is routinely rigid and worshipers are body-searched as they enter. But the bombers apparently slipped in as worshipers left the mosque after prayers. News agencies quoted a police officer as saying two of the bombers were dressed in the all-covering black cloak worn by Shiite women, hiding the bombs that were strapped to them.

The first explosion tore through worshipers at the main exit, witnesses said. Survivors rushed back inside the mosque, where a second bomb went off three minutes later. Ten seconds after that, a third bomb exploded.

Jalal al-Sagheer, the mosque's usual Friday preacher and a leading Shiite politician, told the Associated Press that the second bomber raced into the mosque's courtyard. The third bomber came to Sagheer's office, he said. He escaped injury.

Outside, survivors clambered up the fence around the mosque and leapt over, fearing more bombs. Blood-soaked wounded ran through the streets, looking for a place to hide.

"Don't gather in one spot! Don't gather in one spot!" police loudspeakers warned.

Within minutes, the sealed-off streets around the shrine resembled a battlefield. Iraqi security forces broke through security cordons to carry off the wounded. As always after bombings in Iraq, bursts of automatic-weapons fire discharged by adrenaline-charged security forces kept survivors huddling in fear for long minutes after the blasts.

Col. Sami Jabara, a Baghdad police spokesman, said 68 people were killed. News agencies put the toll at 79, with 160 wounded.

Immediately after the blasts, police and officials from the Shiite movement led by cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr said two Baghdad mosques linked to Sadr also had been hit, with many dead. But health workers at Baghdad's main hospitals said they treated no casualties from the areas of those two mosques, and residents said they had heard no explosions.

Well over 1,000 people have died and tens of thousands have been driven from their homes in sectarian violence following the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. Immediately after that bombing, Shiite militia fighters poured out of Sadr City, a stronghold of Sadr support in Baghdad, and Sadr's armed men were blamed for a wave of retaliatory attacks.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said in a statement Friday: "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, and to pursue justice within the framework of Iraq's laws and constitution."

Ridha Jawad Taqi, a spokesman for the Supreme Council, repeated the Shiites' long-held assertion that attacks such as Friday's were calculated provocations by those "wishing to ignite a sectarian conflict."

Shortly before Friday's attack, a ranking Supreme Council leader suggested the country's crisis had reached such a point that it was time to turn to Shiite religious leaders for political guidance. Shiites must ask Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential religious figure, "to solve this crisis," Sader al-Deen al-Qubbanchi said in his Friday sermon at a mosque in Najaf.

Efforts to form a government have been stalled for nearly four months over the reappointment of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari, supported only by his own Dawa party and by Sadr's organization. On Friday, Dawa suggested for the first time that Jafari might withdraw his candidacy, but only if another member of the party were appointed prime minister instead, an official close to the talks said. Other Shiite parties were said to be considering the idea.

Also Friday, the U.S. military said at least three American service members were killed in separate attacks in Baghdad and north of the capital. The deaths raised to at least 2,349 the number of American troops killed since the Iraq war started in March 2003.

One service member died Friday of wounds suffered while on patrol in western Baghdad, the military said. The statement said the victim's patrol had come under small-arms fire. On Thursday, a soldier from the Army's 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team was killed when his combat patrol was struck by a roadside bomb near Baiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad. And a Marine was killed in action Thursday in Anbar province, west of Baghdad.

Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim and Bassam Sebti in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.