BAGHDAD, April 25, 2009 — Two female suicide bombers struck a major Shiite shrine in Baghdad, killing at least 58 people amid a brutal spike of attacks nine weeks before US troops are to withdraw from Iraqi cities.
At least 140 people were killed within 24 hours as suicide attackers targeted areas packed with civilians in Baghdad and a restaurant filled with Iranian pilgrims northeast of the capital.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon condemned the "appalling" suicide bombings in Iraq on Thursday and Friday, saying their intention was to reignite violence in the country.
"The secretary general condemns the appalling suicide bombings since yesterday in Baghdad and Diyala, which reportedly killed at least 140 people including a large number of visiting Iranian pilgrims," Ban's office said in a statement Friday.
Ban, it added, "is particularly dismayed by reports that one of the bombers was a woman accompanied by a five-year-old child. No cause or grievance can justify such reprehensible acts."
Friday's attacks came as hundreds of worshippers gathered at the Imam Musa al-Kadhim shrine in the historic and predominantly Shiite neighbourhood of Kadhimiyah in northern Baghdad, officials said.
"Fifty-eight people were killed in the attack, including 20 Iranians. Another 125 people were wounded, including 80 Iranian pilgrims," a defence ministry official told AFP.
An interior ministry official confirmed the tolls and said both bombers were women.
They blew themselves up in a crowded market just outside the shrine -- one of the most revered Shiite holy sites in the world -- in the second attack on pilgrims in as many days.
The howling of the wounded echoed through the nearby hospital where the victims were admitted, the hallways packed with security forces and anxious family members looking for loved ones.
Sabiha Kadhim, 50, had come up from the southern Iraqi town of Diwaniyah with her family, four of whom were killed in the blast. She lay on a stretcher, her head and hand bandaged.
"I was near the shrine and suddenly there was a huge explosion and a fire broke out," she said. "I saw human body parts everywhere."
Qassim Zada, a 62-year-old Iranian pilgrim from Tehran who had come to the shrine with his wife, lay nearby, his clothes drenched in blood. "I was only a few metres away from the explosion and I don't know what happened."
A medic said the hospital had received 53 bodies and 93 wounded, including a four-month-old baby whose entire family had been killed.
The head of a local morgue in the Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, meanwhile, said the death toll from a Thursday suicide bombing in a restaurant packed with Iranian pilgrims had risen to 56, including 52 Iranians.
A security official said separately that 63 people had been wounded in the bombing, in the town of Muqdadiyah in the ethnically and religiously mixed province.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians visit Iraq's many Shiite holy sites each year despite the lingering violence.
Another suicide bombing in southeastern Baghdad on Thursday killed 28 displaced people who had been receiving food aid from police, and a smaller suicide attack in Diyala killed three people.
The streak of attacks recalled the height of Iraq's sectarian fighting, before US and Iraqi forces allied with local tribes and former insurgents beginning in late 2006 to rout Al-Qaeda from many of its former strongholds.
General David Petraeus, architect of the "surge" strategy that reduced the violence and now the top commander of US forces in the region, said it will take "considerable" time to eliminate extremists.
"Although Al-Qaeda and other extremist elements in Iraq have been reduced significantly they do pose a continued threat to security and stability," Petraeus said in testimony to Congress.
"The progress there is still fragile and reversible," he added, hours before the new US ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill touched down in Baghdad.
On Thursday the Iraqi army announced it had captured Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a shadowy figure said to be the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and would reveal him on television after his interrogation.
But on Friday Baghdad security spokesman Major General Qassim Atta told AFP the investigation would take more time.
A further attack on Friday saw one person killed and 26 wounded -- 20 of them civilians -- in a car bombing of a police patrol in Jalawla, also in Diyala province, provincial security officials said.
The surge in bloodshed comes as US troops are to withdraw from all major Iraqi towns and cities by June 30 as part of a general drawdown required by a security pact signed with Washington in November.
American forces must leave the country as a whole by the end of 2011.
But April is proving to be a deadly month, with more than 250 people already killed and upwards of 600 wounded, according to an AFP count based on reports from security officials.
Source: AFP
 

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