“A group of pilgrims were walking and passed by a tent offering food and
drinks when a car exploded near them,” Wathiq Muhana, a policeman, was
quoted as saying.
“People were running away covered with blood and bodies were scattered on
the ground.”
Two simultaneous attacks near a restaurant in the Shia city of Hilla, one
carried out by a suicide bomber, killed 20 more. Many of the dead were
police recruits travelling in a minibus ripped apart by the blast.
The attacks provided a grim reprise of the inter-communal violence that
erupted in Iraq in 2006-7 when Shia pilgrims marking religious festivals
were frequently targeted.
Reduced in number, and enjoying significantly less popular support now that US
troops are no longer in the country, the insurgents are thought to lack the
capability of returning the country to that bloody period, which claimed
tens of thousands of lives.
Even so, they remain a threat. Wednesday’s attacks brought this year’s death
toll from mass bombings to more than 420, with the vast majority of the dead
coming from the Shia majority.
With many Sunni Arabs complaining of growing marginalisation at the hands of
Iraq’s Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, some observers fear that the
violence could worsen.
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