The attacks began with a roadside bomb blast in the morning in the Baghdad suburb of Awairij. Officials said that explosion killed two pilgrims walking to the Shi’ite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, to commemorate Arbaeen, the end of a 40-day observance of the death of Imam Hussein, a revered Shi’ite figure.
In the evening, one car bomb went off in the western neighborhood of al-Muwasalat, which is largely Sunni. However, authorities said that blast, which killed nine, appeared to have targeted Shi’ite pilgrims also making their way to Karbala.
Another car bomb struck near a police vehicle in the Shi’ite neighborhood of al-Sha’ab, killing three police officers and four other people, police and hospital officials said.
Security forces discovered a third car bomb in a predominantly Sunni area in western Baghdad later in the evening. It exploded while a demolition team was trying to defuse it, killing a soldier, officials said.
The leaders of Iraq’s rival sects have been locked in a political crisis since last month, when authorities in the Shi’ite-dominated government called for Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi’s arrest on terrorism charges just as the last American troops were leaving the country. Hashemi is Iraq’s highest ranking Sunni politician.
The standoff pits the leaders of the country’s mostly ethnic- and sectarian-based party blocs against each other. Iraq’s Sunni minority dominated the government under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but since he was overthrown, Shi’ites have been in control.
Many fear the crisis will push Iraq toward a renewal of the large-scale sectarian warfare that pushed the country to the brink of civil war five years ago.
Hashemi fled several weeks ago to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, where he is effectively out of reach of state security forces. He said yesterday that Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s demand that he be turned over for trial in Baghdad is hurting efforts to end the crisis.
