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Suicide Bomber Kills 9 In Baghdad

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The New York Times

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 16, 2008

Updated: 08/16/2008 01:11 am

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber in northern Iraq killed nine people on Friday, in the second attack in 24 hours on Shiite pilgrims traveling to Karbala to celebrate one of the holiest days in the Shiite calendar, the Iraqi police said.

A pickup truck exploded near the central bus station at Balad, a largely Shiite town in the overwhelmingly Sunni province of Salahuddin.

Witnesses speculated that the bomber had exploited a recent relaxation in security. "It is an attempt to blow up the atmosphere of reconciliation between the people of Balad and the other cities of Salahuddin and to make another wave of sectarian anger," Col. Ali Saleh, a Salahuddin police spokesman, said.

The roads south to the holy city of Karbala have been jammed with pedestrians, cars, minibuses and buses over the past two days, as millions of Shiites traveled to celebrate the birthday of Muhammad al-Mahdi, a ninth century saint and the last of their 12 revered imams.

At Friday Prayer, the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on followers to pledge in blood their loyalty to the Shiite saint, and to affirm their commitment to driving U.S. troops out of Iraq. Sadr named his Mahdi Army militia after the saint.

The call for a blood pledge was issued in mosques across Iraq as Sadr's followers circulated a document urging Muslims to liberate Islamic countries, "and Iraq especially," from "occupation and colonization." The document included a photocopy of his fingerprint in red.

Sadr recently announced that he intended to split his movement into the Mahdi Army and an unarmed cultural and religious movement. His latest summons specified that followers could take part "either in jihad and military resistance or in jihad and cultural resistance."

With many loyalists on the road to Karbala, only a few hundred turned up at Sadrist offices in the Sadr City district of Baghdad and in Najaf to sign the covenant.

Sadr's political opponents dismissed his urging as a sign of weakness. A close aide of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said: "This recent announcement is just an empty one. The Muqtada al-Sadr issue is finished."

Some residents of Sadr City said that Sadr was reasserting his presence after recent gains by government security forces in his strongholds of Sadr City, Basra and Amara. "He wants to say that 'I am still here,'" said one man, Abu Sadeq. "He can't stand the idea that he lost control of the city."

Ibrahim al-Sumaidaie, a political analyst, said, however, that Sadr was using the summons as a form of census, "to calculate his supporters on the ground" ahead of elections.

During the same holiday last year, Sadr's forces fought a turf war with rival government forces in Karbala, which was jammed with crowds of pilgrims. That bloodshed drew widespread criticism and forced Sadr to freeze the Mahdi Army's activities within days.

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