Militants struck across the Iraqi capital on Wednesday, killing more than 50 people, including 32 in a suicide bombing that targeted pilgrims commemorating a revered Shiite saint, Iraqi police said.
The attacks, the deadliest of which occurred in northern Baghdad’s predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Azamiyah, offered a clear indication of the push by insurgents to exploit Iraq’s political vacuum and destabilise the country as U.S. troops head home.
Police said the bloody suicide bombing that killed 32 and wounded more than 90 people, split the hot Wednesday evening air as Shiite pilgrims were about to cross a bridge leading to the shrine in the Shiite Kazimiyah neighbourhood where a revered imam is buried.
A 30-year-old Sunni resident of Azamiyah said he was drinking tea and watching pilgrims walk by when he and his friends heard the blast.
“We heard a big explosion and everybody rushed to the site to see bodies and hear wounded people, screaming for help,” Saif al-Azami told The Associated Press.
“We helped carry the wounded to the hospital before the ambulances arrived,” he said, adding that some of his Sunni friends who were serving food and water to the Shiite pilgrims were killed and wounded in the attacks.
Militants were able to strike even as security forces were on high alert in the capital, where Shiite pilgrims from all over Iraq converged on a mosque in the northern Baghdad neighbourhood to mark the anniversary of the death of Moussa al-Kadhim, the seventh imam.
A vehicle ban was in place across Kazimiyah, and 200,000 members of security forces were deployed along the way to the shrine, searching pilgrims for weapons at various checkpoints.
Wednesday’s attack took place near the bridge where 900 people died in 2005 in a stampede sparked by a rumour that a suicide bomber was among the more than 1 million people who had gathered at the Kazimiyah shrine to mark the date of the imam’s death.
Also on Wednesday, at least seven Shiite pilgrims were killed in two separate attacks in Harthiya neighbourhood in western Baghdad. Twenty-nine people were wounded in the two attacks, police and hospital officials said.
In northern Baghdad, a roadside bomb targeting the devout Shiites detonated, killing two civilians and two policemen on patrol near by, police officials said.
Earlier on Wednesday, police and hospital officials said two pilgrims died and seven were wounded in eastern Baghdad when a mortar shell hit their procession.
In western Baghdad, militants blew up the homes of Iraqi security officers, killing three family members.
Police officials said militants blew up the homes of two police officers, two members of an anti-al-Qaida Awakening Council and that of an ambulance driver in Wednesday’s dawn attacks in Baghdad’s western suburb of Abu Ghraib.
None of the targeted men were at home at the time of the attacks, but three of the men’s relatives were killed, police and hospital officials in Abu Ghraib said.
Also in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi soldier was killed and six were wounded when a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden car into an army checkpoint. A bomb attached to a car of a police officer exploded in the same western Baghdad suburb, killing his mother and wounding his wife, police officials said.
In the predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Dora in southern Baghdad, a police major was killed when a bomb attached to his car detonated as he drove to work on Wednesday morning, police said.
