CAR bombs rocked Iraq's two holiest Shiite cities today, killing at least 49 people and wounding more than 95, while in downtown Baghdad dozens of gunmen carried out a brazen ambush that killed three Iraqi employees of the organisation running next month's elections. The bombings came just over an hour apart. First, a suicide blast ripped through minibuses at the entrance of the main bus station in Karbala. Then a car bomb went off in a central square of Najaf crowded with people watching a funeral procession that was also attended by the city police chief and provincial governor.
The violence was the latest in an insurgent campaign to disrupt the crucial January 30 elections, the first national polls since the fall of Saddam Hussein. While many have feared that voting in the Sunni areas of northern and central Iraq will be hampered - if not impossible - because of the spiralling violence, today's attacks highlighted that even the strongholds of Iraq's Shiite majority in the south are vulnerable. Shiites have been strong supporters of the elections, which they are likely to dominate.
The Najaf car bomb detonated in central Maidan Square, where a large crowd of people had gathered for the funeral procession of a tribal sheikh - about 100 meters from where Governor Adnan al-Zurufi and police chief Ghalib al-Jazaari were standing. Youssef Munim, head of the statistics department at Najaf's al-Hakim Hospital, said 36 people were killed by the explosion and 65 were wounded. "A car bomb exploded near us," Zurufi said. "I saw about 10 people killed." Jazaari believed he and Zurufi were the targets of the attack, in which three explosives went off about 2.45pm. Both men were unhurt. "As I and the governor were waiting for the funeral processions, three explosions occurred," al-Jazaari said. "We were targeted." It was not immediately clear what the other explosions were from. Residents were pulling bodies of the dead from damaged shops at the square, which is about 400 meters from the Imam Ali Shrine, the holiest Shiite site in Iraq. |