BAGHDAD, Iraq — A religious rite of mourning and penitence turned into a day of bloodshed Friday as suicide bombers mingling with Shiite Muslim worshipers and insurgents firing mortars and staging ambushes killed about 30 people.The attacks in and around Baghdad, like similar violence in recent weeks and months, appeared intended to inflame sectarian divisions among Iraqis. But Shiites defied the bombs and surged back into their mosques, vowing not to retaliate. At the same time, they braced for more violence Saturday, the height of the Shiites’ observance of Ashura, a day on which bombs around Iraq killed more than 170 people last year.
“Whoever is trying to do this wants to create civil war,” Ali Hussein, 39, a laborer, said at the site of one blast. “They couldn’t stop the elections. They know if a civil war will start, no one will be able to stop it.”
The violence rocked a country still forming a new government - one that will be led by Iraq’s long-oppressed Shiite majority. Negotiations among political parties over who will be the next prime minister have failed to produce agreement, and there were signs that the wait was aggravating tension between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
During Friday prayers at a mosque in central Baghdad, a senior figure in the Shiite coalition that won the most votes in the Jan. 30 parliamentary election bluntly warned of retaliation against officials who worked with the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein.
“We’re going to assume power in a government that is a wreck,” said Jalaleddin Saghir, prayer leader at the Bratha mosque. “Our society suffered from many problems ... after the criminals of the Baath Party returned to the security apparatus. There is a necessity of purifying the security apparatus. Do not expect us to practice our work with transparency.”
The very smell on the streets here Friday underscored the newly public importance of religion in Iraq, officially secular for most of Saddam’s reign. Shiites slaughtered sheep and cows and stirred the meat into huge pots of stew to feed neighbors, an Ashura tradition outlawed by Saddam.
“During the former regime, we couldn’t do this,” said Ali Yasari, 50, a merchant, directing his large family as they stirred the stew. Friday’s attacks, he said, “are the tax we have to pay to achieve democracy and freedom.”
The first blast occurred as prayers began in a mosque in Dora, a working-class neighborhood of Shiites and Sunnis in south Baghdad.
“A suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt came in and mixed with the guards who were searching the people who came to worship,” Iraqi army Sgt. Arias Hashim said. When challenged, the bomber detonated a vest packed with explosives.
Inside the mosque, a new sanctuary built after Saddam’s fall, Anjad Sabah, 28, said he was listening to the preacher when the explosion jolted the congregation. “I went out immediately. I found people thrown here and there, covered with blood,” Sabah said. “I even found children on the ground, wounded. I pulled some of them out and put them in the first car I found and told them to go to the hospital.”
Dead and wounded were taken to Yarmuk Hospital, where taxi driver Ammar Faris, 29, later described the blast.
“I came to the prayer late. I was parking my car in front of the mosque, but before I switched it off, the explosion happened,” said Faris, wan and breathing shallowly under a blanket that covered shrapnel wounds in his chest. “I didn’t feel anything. I knew only that a crowd of people were carrying me, and then I found myself in the hospital.”
Hospital officials said 15 persons were killed and 34 wounded in the attack.
About 20 minutes later and five miles away, in the neighborhood of Bayaa, guards at another mosque got a phone call alerting them to the first explosion. Moments later, they saw three men get out of a car and start walking toward worshipers gathered outside the mosque.
Two guards in the balcony of the mosque shouted at the approaching strangers, said one of the guards there, who gave his name as Abu Murtadha. “The guards shouted stop, stop, stop. But they didn’t stop. So the guards by the gate shot at them.
“The first one blew up when the shots started. The second one threw a grenade, and then blew himself up. The third one ran toward the mosque and blew himself up,” said Abu Murtadha, who wore a guard’s badge bearing the picture of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
One person was killed by the attackers, according to an official at Yarmuk Hospital’s chaotic receiving desk.
Five miles to the northeast, mortar shells struck a shop near a Shiite procession in Baghdad’s Ashulah neighborhood. Police said three people were killed and five injured.
Attacks aimed at Iraqi and U.S. security forces also exacted a heavy toll Friday.
Two American soldiers were killed by bombs - one near Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad, the other 25 miles north of the capital, according to the military. The military also announced the deaths of three soldiers in separate attacks Thursday in and near the northern city of Mosul.
Also in Mosul, three mortar rounds fell on a bazaar near City Hall, killing a teen-age boy and wounding three people, according to Zaid Azzam, a doctor at Republican Hospital.
And in Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, an Iraqi army officer was shot to death, and three others, including a 2-year-old child, were wounded.
The police chief in the holy city of Najaf, Ghalib Jazaeri, confirmed that two of his sons, both lieutenants in the police force, were abducted and executed in nearby Karbala. Jazaeri, a former military officer, has been highly visible in efforts to oust insurgents from Najaf, but he said recently that he was worried about infiltrators inside his police department.
In Karbala, worshipers flocked to the shrine of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad whose death in battle in the 7th century is the focus of the Ashura rite. Shiites march through the streets in a funereal cadence, beating themselves on the back with chains in symbolic penitence for the betrayal that led to Hussein’s death.
Last year, a massive car bomb there and bombings in Baghdad claimed more than 170 lives. This year, Karbala was flooded with police and Iraqi soldiers. Iraq closed its borders to prevent Iranian pilgrims from crowding into town.
“We are not afraid. Death comes everywhere and every day,” said a woman who gave her name as Um Mohammed, 42, and said she had traveled to Karbala from the countryside. But, she added, “we feel safe here because of the security measures.”
Correspondent Anthony Shadid in Baghdad and special correspondents Sahar Nageeb in Baghdad, Dlovan Brwari in Mosul and Saad Sarhan in Karbala contributed to this report.
