Gunmen battled Iraqi security forces on Tuesday near two of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest shrines in the city of Kerbala, where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims had gathered for a religious festival.
A senior security source in Baghdad said 25 people had been killed, mostly police officers. An official at Kerbala’s al-Hussein Hospital said it had received eight bodies and 29 wounded.
Reuters witnesses in the city, 110 south of Baghdad, saw columns of smoke rising from the centre of the city, apparently from cars that police said had been set ablaze.
They could also hear the sound of intense gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades being fired. US war planes could be seen in the skies above.
The security source said 65 people had been wounded.
”I am hiding in a shop. I can hear the sound of gunshots. The situation is very unstable and the Iraqi army and police commandos have been deployed on the streets and on rooftops,” said one pilgrim, who asked not to be named.
A curfew was imposed in Kerbala’s Old City, location of the shrines.
The fighting appeared to be between armed pilgrims loyal to the fiery Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and local police linked to the rival Shi’ite political movement, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and its Badr Organisation.
The two factions, the two biggest Shi’ite blocs in Parliament, are locked in a power struggle for control of towns and cities in Iraq’s predominantly Shi’ite south. The police in many of these towns are seen to be loyal to Badr.
Analysts fear the struggle for dominance will intensify ahead of provincial elections expected to take place next year.
The fighting in one of Iraq’s most stable cities could be seen as embarrassing for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is keen to show that his security forces are ready to take control of security from US-led forces.
One of his two deputies, Barham Salih, a Kurd, warned in an interview with Reuters late on Monday that an early US troop pull-out would trigger a full-scale civil war.
”A premature withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be a disaster, not only for Iraq, but for the region and the international community as a whole,” Salih said.
”It will lead to an all-out civil war, it will lead to a regional war in my opinion because the fate of Iraq is crucial to the regional balance and to regional security.”
The pilgrims had been celebrating the ninth century birth of Mohammad al-Mahdi, the last of 12 imams Shi’ites revere as saints and who they believe never died and will return to save mankind. — Reuters