Car bomb in Iraq’s Shi’ite Kufa kills 39

By Khaled Farhan

KUFA, Iraq (Reuters) – A car bomb hit a group of laborers
in a crowded market in a Shi’ite city in southern Iraq on
Tuesday, killing 39 people and sparking brief clashes between
protesters and police, witnesses and hospital sources said.

The blast occurred 50-100 meters from a Shi’ite shrine in
the city of Kufa as laborers were boarding a minibus that had
pulled into the crowd looking for workers, witnesses said.

Hospital and police sources said 55 people were wounded in
the blast, which dealt a fresh blow to Shi’ite Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki’s efforts to promote national reconciliation.

Police who arrived in the scene were pelted with rocks by
angry crowds. Many appeared to be followers of radical Shi’ite
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has many supporters in the town.
Kufa is near the holy city of Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south
of Baghdad.

Police fired into the air to disperse the onlookers and
confused scenes ensued, a Reuters reporter at the scene said.

“It is very chaotic now. The police are shooting in the air
and the crowds are running,” he said. “Ambulances are racing
around town.”

The blast, one of bloodiest in Iraq since a government of
national unity took office in April, came a day after gunmen
killed more than 50 people in an attack in a market near
Baghdad.

Violence between majority Shi’ites and Sunnis, dominant
under Saddam Hussein but now the backbone of an insurgency
against the U.S.-sponsored political process, has pushed Iraq
to the brink of civil war.

Maliki, a Shi’ite Islamist, has urged Iraqis to rally
behind his reconciliation plan as the last hope to avert
all-out war.

But Shi’ite religious and political leaders have warned
that mass attacks against their community by suspected Sunni
insurgents meant their calls for restraint were being ignored.

Earlier this month, a suicide car bomber blasted two coach-
loads of Iranian pilgrims in Kufa, killing 10 people and
wounding 40.

Gatherings of laborers in crowded markets have become a
favorite target of Sunni al Qaeda insurgents, who Iraqi and
U.S. officials say are intent on sparking a civil war between
Shi’ites and Sunnis.

On Monday, dozens of armed men sprayed a market in the
religiously mixed town of Mahmudiya with mortar and grenades,
killing over 50 people.

President Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, called on clerics
from both Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim sects to condemn such
violence, which he said aimed to destabilize the country and
“to create a climate of mistrust among the citizens.”