Terror At A Shrine

By Bobby Ghosh

When the bomb went off shortly after 2 p.m., the narrow lane, crammed with people, acted as a muffler. Just 300 yards away there was only a low boom, like a faraway thunderclap. It was as if the sound had been absorbed by the tens of thousands of devout Shi'ites gathered outside their faith's holiest shrine to listen to Friday prayers over the speakers. But then a louder sound rumbled down the lane and into the nearby square--the anguished shriek emerging from a thousand throats. Panicked worshippers charged into the square, their dust-covered dishdashas spattered with blood. "It's a bomb, a bomb!" screamed a man, his eyes wide with fear, his face pockmarked by shrap-shrapnel lacerations. "I think they have murdered the Syed."

Whoever they turn out to be, the man was right. They had. Among the more than 80 people who died when a car bomb exploded outside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, 120 miles south of Baghdad, was Ayatullah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, one of the nation's most senior Shi'ite clerics and the founder of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He had been leading the Friday prayers in the mosque. The atrocity was the most devastating event since the end of formal hostilities in the Iraq war and counts as one of the worst single acts of violence against civilians anywhere in the world in modern times. In Washington, President Bush said the bombing "demonstrates the cruelty and desperation of the enemies of the Iraqi people." It demonstrates something else too: the extraordinary complexity of the challenge facing U.S. troops in Iraq, who must contend with not just violence directed at them but also the possibility of widespread strife among Iraq's various political, ethnic and religious groups.

At first the Ayatullah's fate was unclear. The blast occurred moments after the Friday morning prayers, and most of those outside believed he had not yet left the shrine to Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, in the heart of Najaf. Assuming that al-Hakim was still inside, many had thought he would have been protected from the explosion by the shrine's massive western wall and its huge door, the Bab-e-Kibbleh, which remained standing. But when the bomb went off, the 64-year-old cleric was outside the shrine and about to get into his car. He was killed instantly.

Across the lane from the wall, a crater in the black-tar road marked the spot where the bomb exploded. Within 30 ft. were the twisted carcasses of at least seven cars--alHakim's white Toyota Land Cruiser among them--most mangled beyond recognition and still ablaze. In the market across from the shrine, the blast reduced several shops to mounds of rubble. Street vendors' stalls that had been laden with dried fruits and nuts were incinerated, their contents sprayed across the area. The few people who ran toward the bomb site were showered by a hail of pistachios and almonds.

At the site of the explosion, the air was quickly filled with the sickly sweet odor of burning human flesh. The walls of the shrine saved thousands of worshippers inside, but those outside felt the full force of the blast. Charred victims were strewn across the narrow lane, some still alive, if only barely. The injured ran, stumbled or crawled away, blood spouting from their wounds. A man leaned against a burning car, his clothes incinerated and strips of skin hanging from his elbows and knees. As rescuers tried to guide him to safety, it became clear that the flesh on his back had melted and fused to the paint of the car. He was ripped off the car, laid down on a jury-rigged stretcher--a sheet of cloth pulled from the wreckage of a fabric shop--and hurried away by four men.

The bolts of fabric from the shop came in handy. By the time the first fire truck roared up, barely 10 minutes after the blast, at least a dozen shrouds had been fashioned from the cloth. One of them, made of polyester, caught an ember and began to blaze, blackening the body underneath it. Two of the rescuers turned away to throw up. Handcarts were pressed into service as makeshift hearses. The fire truck hosed the cars down. A puddle gathered in the crater, and rescuers turned plastic iceboxes into makeshift scoops to take the water out of the crater and use it to douse small fires in the wreckage of the shops.

Even before the first ambulances arrived on the scene, speculation about the perpetrators began. "This is the revenge of Saddam Hussein," sobbed a young man as he helped cover a charred corpse with a bloodstained sheet. Bystanders shouted anti-Saddam slogans. Then an elderly man in a red fez, which identified him as a member of the shrine staff, screamed, "Not Saddam, by God, but the Wahhabis! They are the enemies of the Shi'as!" The accusation against the austere, fundamentalist sect of Islam was taken up by the rapidly growing crowd. Quickly abuse was aimed at Osama bin Laden; for many Iraqis, Wahhabism and al-Qaeda are interchangeable.

As another body was clawed from the rubble, the cursing gave way to the sober recitation of the Islamic creed, a customary courtesy for the dead: "There is no God but Allah." As the body count climbed, the words were repeated again and again. An hour after the blast, the search had assumed a semblance of order, and the volunteer rescue workers, their fingers bleeding from their barehanded digging, chanted the creed almost continuously. For a moment, all thoughts of al-Qaeda and Saddam were banished. Then came word that a group of "Wahhabis" had been spotted in a hotel half a mile down the road. A small contingent of U.S. soldiers made an appearance but stayed a few blocks away. Shouting angrily, some men peeled away from the crowd and sprinted toward the hote. By the time they got there, two men in Afghan-style clothing had been cornered by a small mob and were being slapped and shoved around.

An old cleric suggested they be taken to the Americans. The mob was disappointed at being denied a lynching, but in Najaf, nobody disobeys a cleric. At first the soldiers refused to accept the prisoners. As the cleric negotiated with the Americans, the mob began to think again about the "Wahhabis." One man pulled out a pocketknife and headed for the two men, who claimed to have come from Basra to visit the grave of a relative. "Kill the Wahhabis!" the crowd shouted. "Slit their throats!" Finally, the Americans took charge. A group of soldiers quickly bundled the two men into a humvee and sped off. (On Saturday, U.S. military sources said the two men were still in custody, together with a third man who had been arrested by the local police.) The crowd started advancing menacingly toward the remaining Americans until the cleric shouted, "Don't waste your energy here! Go and give blood at the hospital. They will need a lot of blood today." Again his word brooked no argument, and the crowd melted away.

Back at the bomb site, rumors about al-Hakim continued to swirl. It was not until 5 p.m. that his death was confirmed, and by then about 80 bodies had been counted. With more than 150 injured, the main hospital in Najaf was straining to cope with the load. "This is a catastrophe for Iraqis," said Hassan al-Naji al-Moussawi, imam of the Mohsen Mosque in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shi'ite-dominated suburb, once known as Saddam City. "And for it to happen at the walls of the Imam Ali shrine, it's as if somebody has reached into the body of Iraq and cut off an organ."

On the Iraqi street, al-Qaeda remained the principal suspect, just as it was in the case of the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad two weeks ago. Iraqis clung to the belief that no homegrown militant group would deliberately kill so many Iraqis. "Only foreigners like the Wahhabis would kill Shi'as without hesitation," said Ali al-Rubieh, a pilgrim visiting Najaf from Basra. "They don't regard us as Muslims, anyway." The White House and Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, described the bombing as an act of terrorism, which has become shorthand for al-Qaeda. And in Najaf, reports circulated that the local police had arrested up to 19 men with alleged al-Qaeda connections, though in the chaos it was impossible to say whether that haul included the two men whom TIME had seen saved from the mob by U.S. forces. Privately, some U.S. government officials in Washington said they believed, after a preliminary assessment, that secular Baathists loyal to Saddam were responsible. Hamid al-Bayati, SCIRI's spokesman in London, and Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Conference saw the handiwork of Saddam's supporters.

But in Iraq many were beginning to suspect that the bombing may have been part of a power struggle within the Shi'ite leadership. Although they are the majority in Iraq, Shi'ites were repressed under Saddam's rule. Whoever establishes himself as a leader of the Shi'ites now will have substantial power in any future political arrangements. As the founder of SCIRI, al-Hakim represented the relatively moderate, pragmatic faction of the Shi'ite community. Although he had long espoused anti-American sentiments, al-Hakim had been prepared to cooperate with the CPA. His brother Abdel Aziz al-Hakim is SCIRI's representative in the U.S.-appointed Governing Council for Iraq, and in Bakir's final Friday address, he condemned the daily attacks on American troops.

That very moderation, however, made him suspect in the eyes of the larger, more radical Shi'ite organization, the Sadr Group, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, 29. Cooperation with the coalition is anathema to al-Sadr, whose power base lies among the poorest Shi'ite communities, especially in Sadr City. Descended from a line of venerated ayatullahs, two of whom were executed by Saddam's regime, al-Sadr has the one thing the Hakim brothers lacked: street cred. He speaks in the rough argot of the slums, and his sermons, usually given after Friday prayers, are delivered in a take-no-prisoners style that appeals to young Shi'ites.

It is from the youth of the slums that al-Sadr is recruiting his private army, the Jaish-e-Mahdi, named after a historical Shi'ite leader who disappeared in the 9th century and will, the devout believe, return one day to restore justice to the world. Although he has said his soldiers will be "armed with faith" only, al-Sadr supporters say he is recruiting special regiments made up entirely of former military men, who are being issued weapons and ammunition. Al-Sadr sacked his chief representative in Sadr City, insiders say, because the man was thought to be too religious and therefore too soft. His replacement, Kais Haadi al-Kazali, has stepped up the recruitment drive for al-Sadr's army.

The coalition paid al-Sadr scant attention until two weeks ago, when an American helicopter tried to knock down a Shi'ite banner from a telecommunications tower in Sadr City. Al-Sadr was able to mobilize tens of thousands of Shi'ites in Baghdad's largest street protest since the end of the war. Even so, a Pentagon official in Iraq says, the CPA has not yet got the full measure of al-Sadr. With his vision of Islamic rule in Iraq, his deep hatred of Americans and his rapidly growing army, al-Sadr is, according to this official, "the most dangerous man in Iraq."

People in Najaf and other Shi'ite towns in southern Iraq think they know exactly what al-Sadr is capable of. In the days after Saddam's fall, his bodyguards were accused of knifing to death--at the gates of the mosque where al-Hakim was killed--the moderate cleric Abdul-Majid al-Khoei, who had just returned from exile in London. (At the time, al-Sadr told TIME that the bodyguards involved had been dismissed before the assassination and that he had nothing to do with the killing of al-Khoei.) In April, al-Sadr's supporters surrounded the home of Grand Ayatullah Ali Sistani, supreme religious leader of Iraqi Shi'ites, and demanded that he leave the country. Sistani was saved by American troops.

Some SCIRI supporters suspect that al-Sadr was behind an attempt on Aug. 24 to assassinate al-Hakim's uncle Mohammed Said al-Hakim. A bomb exploded outside al-Hakim's home, injuring him and killing three. Al-Sadr has denied any involvement in that attack. Moments before last week's blast, al-Sadr was across town at the grand mosque of Kufa, delivering a sermon in which he condemned the attack on the older Hakim. "It was the act of criminals and should be punished," al-Sadr said.

In Washington, officials acknowledged the intensity of the struggle for supremacy among the Shi'ites. But they thought it "inconceivable," as one put it, that any Shi'ite could bomb his religion's holiest site. "It would be like a Catholic blowing up the Vatican," said the official. That may be so, but the miserable truth for the U.S. is that it almost doesn't matter whether the bombing was the work of someone within the Shi'ite community or Baathists. Either way, it foreshadows violence among Iraq's various groups. For an occupying force--as the old imperial powers learned the hard way--keeping public order in such circumstances is the hardest of all tasks. Sooner or later, everyone hates the outsider. The occupation of Iraq has been a mess for months. It just got a whole lot messier. --With reporting by Timothy J. Burger and James Carney/Washington

With reporting by Timothy J. Burger and James Carney/Washington