Arab television stations reported 25 dead in Karbala. Around 20 people may have been killed in the Baghdad blasts, witnesses said. Stunned witnesses believed the attacks were carried out by suicide bombers.

U.S. intelligence officials have long been concerned about the possibility of militant attack on the Ashoura festival, and coalition and Iraqi forces bolstered security around Karbala and other Shiite-majority towns in the south during the pilgrimage.

Last month, U.S. officials released what they said was a letter by a Jordanian militant outlining a strategy of spectacular attacks on Shiites, aimed at sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war.

In Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, five blasts went off shortly after 10 a.m. near two of the most important shrines in Shiite Islam, hurling bodies and sending crowds of pilgrims fleeing in panic.

Three explosions rocked the inside and outside of the Kazimiya shrine in Baghdad at about the same time. Police sealed off the area while panicked people fled screaming and ambulances raced to the scene. Dozens of armed men in civilian clothes tried to maintain order.

Some witnesses at Kazimiya said the blasts were carried out by suicide bombers. The Kazimiya shrine in northern Baghdad contains the tombs of two other Shiite saints, Imam Mousa Kazem and his grandson Imam Muhammad al-Jawad.

In Karbala, an Associated Press reporter saw 10 bodies that appeared to be dead being loaded onto wooden carts and taken away. Many others were injured. Bodies ripped apart by the force of the blasts lay on the streets.

The Ashoura festival, which marks the 7th century killing of Imam Hussein, is the most important religious period in Shiite Islam and draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and other Shiite communities to the Iraqi shrines.

The Karbala blasts struck near the golden-domed shrine where Imam Hussein is buried, in a neighborhood of several pilgrimage sites. After the blasts, Shiite militiamen tried to clear the terrified crowds, firing guns into the air. Two more blasts went off about a half-hour later.

"We were standing there (next to the mosques) when we heard an explosion. We saw flesh, arms legs, more flesh. Then the ambulance came," Tarar, an 18-year-old said, using only one name.

Two armed Iraqi policemen broke down in tears as they walked through the bomb site.

Iraqi militia initially tried to control the crowd and arrested two men the crowd attempted to lynch. Rumors swirled throughout the city as to the cause of the blasts, ranging from mortars fired from outside the town to suicide bombers in the crowd.

One witness said a bomb was hidden near the mosque.

"Many Iranians were killed, I was 10 meters (yards) away, it was hidden under rubbish," one witness, identifying himself only as Sairouz, said.

Loudspeakers from the mosques continued to broadcast recitations from the Quran, only briefly interrupting the Ashoura commemoration to ask the crowd to part so that ambulances could move through the crowd. The mosques were not damaged by the blasts.

The Kazimiya blasts went off inside the shrine's ornately tiled walls and outside in a square packed with street vendors catering to pilgrims. The street outside Kazimiya was littered with thousands of shoes and sandals belonging to worshippers who had been praying inside the shrine. The courtyard inside the shrine was strewn with torn limbs.

Hundreds of gunmen swarmed inside and outside the walled shrine as men wept. A U.S. helicopter hovered over the shrine. Black mourning banners traditional in Ashoura celebrations hung in tatters.

"How is it possible that any man let alone a Muslim man does this on the day of al-Hussein," said Thaer al-Shimri, a member of the Shiite Al-Dawa party. "Today war has been launched on Islam."

In the letter released last month, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an extremists believed linked to al-Qaida, wrote that stepped up attacks were needed to disrupt the planned handover of power to the Iraqis on June 30.

Also Tuesday, a land mine exploded in the Abu Nawas neighborhood of Baghdad, damaging a car used by the Arab television station Al-Jazeera and lightly wounding several staffers. Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion.


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