Shia's
11 September
By Justin Huggler
in Karbala
03 March 2004
The
Independent
It was the Shia's 11 September: a massacre
of men, women and children who tried helplessly to escape as suicide
bombs exploded and mortars fell among packed crowds. Survivors scrambled
desperately over the severed limbs of the dead that littered the streets.
It came on the holiest
day in the Shia calendar, and millions of their fellow believers around
the world watched it play out on their television screens. They watched
as their holiest shrines were desecrated with the blood of the innocent.
They watched as what was supposed to be a day of liberation - the first
time for years that the Ashoura ceremony, which was banned by Saddam
Hussein, was allowed to take place in Iraq - ended with the streets
of Karbala littered with the bodies of women and children. At least
160 people were killed in attacks on Shia in Iraq yesterday, 85 of them
in Karbala.
The images are indelible.
I was 100 metres away from the first explosion, but you didn't have
to be that close. Millions of Shia saw that first terrifying explosion,
which sent a great burst of yellow fire bellowing over the roofs of
Karbala; cameras were already filming the ceremonies. You could watch
it all on the television news, just like on 11 September.
You didn't have
to experience our fearful escape through the back streets, trying to
guess which way safety lay. You could hear the screams, in your own
living room. You could watch the shrapnel burst through the crowd as
a mortar shell landed in the stampede.
It was not just
in Karbala that the blood was shed. In Baghdad too, Shia were killed
by a series of suicide bombs at a shrine. And beyond Iraq, in the Pakistani
city of Quetta, Shia were cut down as they tried to march through the
streets for Ashoura. Whoever was behind these attacks planned a frontal
assault on the Shia world.
On the streets of
Karbala, it was terrifying. Just before the attacks the city was packed
with more than a million Shia, here for the ritual mourning for the
grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, Imam Hussein. The streets were overflowing
with vast crowds: bands of young men in black ritually beating themselves
with chains, Iraqis in black dishdashas, Pakistanis and Afghans in pakul
caps, and Iranians in green silk scarves. (There were at least 40 Iranians
among the dead yesterday.) Packed in, the crowds had nowhere to escape
when all hell broke loose.
Just minutes before
the first explosion, the fear crept up on us that the huge crowds were
too easy a target, and we cut down a less crowded side street. The fear
may have saved our lives. Moments later the first explosion went off.
The pilgrims didn't stand a chance.
Later, outside the
hospital, Kerim abu Ali described what had happened in that crowd. The
hair on the left side of his face and his beard had been burnt by the
heat of the explosion. His arm was bandaged and he had cuts all over
his left side.
"Suddenly there
was a huge fire in the street," he said. "I passed out. When
I came round I saw dead people all around - so many dead people.
"I saw pieces
of flesh everywhere, and heard screaming. When the ambulance came I
just jumped in."
That was just the
first explosion. In the minutes that followed, as we tried increasingly
desperately to get out of the maze of streets, I counted eight more.
It was a terrifying
journey. The explosions went off all over the city centre, and nobody
knew where the next would be. Many fled one explosion only to be caught
in the next.
At least in the
back streets we could move easily. Those caught on the main streets
were trapped in the crowds.
In the chaos, some
Shia militiamen started shooting hopelessly at invisible assailants.
As we came to the edge of the city, The Independent's driver, Mohammed,
grabbed my sleeve, hissed "shooting!", and dragged me into
the cover of a wall.
The first blast
appears to have been from a suicide bomber who detonated his explosives
outside Karbala's second shrine, that of Hussein's half-brother, Abbas.
Some of the explosions that followed seem to have been mortar shells.
Yassin Dekheel, who was injured in the leg, described how he saw one
of the later blasts, at the Baghdad Gate on the other side of the city
centre from the first, leave the street littered with bodies. The concept
of martyrdom is at the heart of Shia belief, and whoever was behind
yesterday's attacks provided plenty of new martyrs yesterday.
When we got back
to Baghdad, grateful to be alive, we found that there had been a simultaneous
attack at the main Shia shrine in the city's Kadhimiya quarter. Three
suicide bombers set off their explosives simultaneously - two outside
the shrine, and one, in an ultimate act of desecration, inside it. "I
saw a woman holding her baby in her arms; the baby was dead," one
man who refused to give his name told us outside the shrine.
The assault on all
that is sacred to the Shia was so absolute that it was almost mocking.
The attacks could not have been more calculated to cause a rift within
Iraq, and the greater Islamic world, between Sunni and Shia.
This year's vast
ceremonies to mark Ashoura were about Shia power. They were part of
efforts by a majority, long repressed, to reclaim what it sees as its
rightful place in Iraqi society. Many roads in Baghdad have been closed
to make way for bands of men beating themselves for Ashoura in recent
days, and the city has been festooned with black, red, green and yellow
Shia flags.
The overt displays
of power, coinciding with growing Shia demands for a lion's share in
power in the new Iraq , have set nerves jangling among Iraq's Sunni
minority. But if the plan was to set Shia against Sunni, that was not
the immediate effect. The first target of Shia rage was the Americans.
Angry Shia from
Kadhimiya started stoning American tanks. In a disastrous public relations
move, the soldiers responded with live fire and, according to unconfirmed
claims, killed three bystanders.
A few accused the
Americans of carrying out the attacks themselves. More blamed them for
not preventing them. "The Americans caused this by creating the
security vacuum in Iraq," one angry Shia in Kadhimiya said. "Do
you really expect us to believe they cannot manage better security than
this?" It was a sentiment that was echoed by the Shia's spiritual
leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Everybody had feared
that an atrocity was coming. American occupation forces have been talking
of stepped-up security for weeks; journalists had been debating whether
to risk being on the streets of Karbala. But the security in the holy
city was woefully inadequate. I got right to the city centre without
being frisked, or even asked to show any identification.
Who was really behind
the attacks remains unexplained. The Iraqi police said they had caught
a number of suspects, but they made similar claims after a car bomb
killed 85 people in Najaf last year; no further details emerged.
There were fears
of immediate strife between Sunni and Shia after that bombing, but the
situation remained calm. There were, however, disturbing signs of change
yesterday. Private Shia militias had set up their own heavily armed
roadblocks outside Karbala. Among them were the Iranian-backed Badr
Brigades and the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, who has made threats
of armed resistance against the Americans. If the battle lines are being
drawn for a Shia-Sunni conflict, these will be the foot soldiers.