IRAQ: Funerals of those killed in Baghdad bomb blast as leading Shi'ite cleric calls on Sunni leader to stop killing Shi'ites

The death toll in Thursday's (November 23) multiple car bombings in Sadr City, a Shi'ite slum district of Baghdad, rose to 202 after around 40 of the wounded died overnight, police said. 250 were wounded and Baghdad remains under curfew. Daylight brought visions of the mangled metal wrought by six car bombs and a series of mortar blasts that transformed streets and a market into a bloodbath. Residents of Sadr City carried away their dead on Friday (November 24). Hundreds of mourners marched behind coffins through the Baghdad dawn, chanting in anger and lament for the victims of the bloodiest attack Iraq has known since the U.S. invasion. Dozens of coffins were heading for Najaf, the traditional resting place for Shi'ites and home to the majority community's spiritual leadership. After months of mounting sectarian violence since the destruction of a Shi'ite shrine at Samarra in February, the capital is already under curfew for several hours during the weekly Friday prayers, when Muslims divide into their separate mosques. Now the curfew is absolute and indefinite, with Baghdad airport also closed and the key oil port of Basra in the south, controlled by Shi'ite parties, shut down in sympathy. Other than security and emergency services the only vehicles allowed on Baghdad's streets this morning were those carrying the dead. "Yesterday was a disaster but there have been many before - lots of funerals. The victims are women and children. You know how overcrowded Sadr City is, so it's there that they chose to take their car bombs and blow them up," said Sabah, a Baghdad resident. Another man appealed for calm amid fear the country is sliding deeper into civil war. "At the end of the day we are all losers. This is our home, our country. Sunni and Shi'ites must come together to rebuild our country so we can breathe the air," he said. A day after seeing his Baghdad stronghold devastated by a series of blasts, Moqtada al-Sadr, the young cleric whose Mehdi Army militia dominates Sadr City, told chanting supporters in a Friday sermon that the most prominent religious figure from the Sunni minority must issue a fatwa demanding an end to the killing of Shi'ites. Sadr, who on Thursday blamed Sunni Islamist al Qaeda militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists for the blasts, made the call during a sermon at Friday prayers in Kufa, just outside the southern holy city of Najaf. It was directed at Harith al-Dari, the head of Iraq's influential Muslim Clerics Association, an umbrella group for Sunni religious leaders, who is wanted by Iraqi authorities on terrorism charges. Dari, who lives abroad, denies the charges. Sadr said Dari must issue religious rulings, or fatwas, to fellow minority Sunnis, who form the backbone of a three-year-old insurgency, forbidding the killing of Shi'ites or membership of al Qaeda. He said Dari should also order Sunnis to help rebuild the Golden Mosque in Samarra, whose destruction in February, blamed on al Qaeda, sparked a cycle of sectarian revenge killings that shows no signs of abating. Sadr called for restraint from his followers, although similar public statements after the bombing of a major Shi'ite shrine at Samarra in February failed to prevent thousands of reprisal killings, much of which Sunni leaders blame on the Mehdi Army. Sadr said that if Dari issued the fatwas he would oppose Dari's arrest warrant. The arrest warrant issued last week enraged Sunnis, who accused Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of turning a blind eye to militias tied to parties within his own government, who have been blamed for some of the worst sectarian violence. Dari, the best-known Sunni religious authority in Iraq, told Reuters in Amman this week that the government had trumped up the charges to undermine his role in defending a community which he said faced the brunt of the killings. Thousands of mourners travelled to the funerals from Baghdad to Najaf, the traditional burial site for pious Shi'ites which is reputed to be the world's largest cemetery.

ITN Source | November 24, 2006

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