Naseer Al-Nahr, Asharq Al-Awsat

BAGHDAD, 30 August 2003 — A massive car bomb exploded at the Imam Ali Mosque complex after Friday prayers, killing at least 90 people including a key Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Al-Hakim, and wounding 150. The attack, which comes as country’s Shiites are engaged in a generational power struggle, was certain to complicate American efforts to pacify an increasingly violent Iraq.

The terrorist strike against innocent civilians as they emerged from a mosque on the traditional Muslim day of prayer and rest produced what may have been the biggest one-day death toll in the war since American forces fought their way into Baghdad on April 8 and 9.

The Shiites immediately laid blame on Saddam Hussein loyalists — chiefly from the rival Sunni sect and oppressors of the majority Shiites for decades.

While the Shiites themselves are engaged in a struggle for control of the sect and its future direction, there was no evidence the bombing was the work of the younger Shiite faction. That group has strongest support in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum and has been trying to wrest control from Al-Hakim followers. The leader of Iraqi National Congress and governing council member, Ahmad Chalabi, blamed the attack on those behind the Aug. 19 suicide truck bombing at the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed at least 23 people and injured more than 100. He offered no evidence to support his claim.

Dr. Safaa Al-Ameedi said the initial death toll was the result of a survey of all the city’s medical facilities. Many of the wounded were in critical condition, he said. The physician said medical facilities throughout Najaf were thronged with people looking for relatives and loved ones.

Al-Ameedi said an urgent call had been put to hospitals in nearby Karbala asking for fluids and medical supplies to treat the survivors.

The car bomb outside the mosque was detonated as Al-Hakim emerged after delivering a sermon calling for Iraqi unity and help from Arab neighbors in rebuilding and pacifying the country, witness said.

Hours after the blast, pandemonium still gripped the city. People screamed in the streets in grief and anger. Some attacked reporters. Others searched through the rubble for more victims. A line of shops opposite the mosque was reduced to a tangled mass of metal and wood. Goods for sale before the explosion were strewn in shreds about the pavement. Bodies and body parts could be seen in the ruins.

A group of men and women pressed their hands and cheeks against the doors of the mosque, which had been closed after the blast. “Even the Americans didn’t bomb us like this,” screamed one woman through her tears. Some mosaic tiles were blown off the mosque and a crater about 1.5 meters wide was dug out at the front of the mosque.

“The people who did this are traitors and bastards. They are not real Iraqis,” said Nagih Salah, a 40-year-old truck driver who was on the opposite side of the mosque when the blast occurred.

No coalition troops were in the area of the mosque, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Jim Cassella said in Washington. US-led troops have been asked to stay away from the mosque by Shiite officials.

The top US civilian official in Iraq, Paul Bremer issued a statement denouncing the bombing. “The bombing today in Najaf shows again that the enemies of the new Iraq will stop at nothing. I express my deepest sympathy to the families of those killed and to the injured and their families,” Bremer’s statement said.

Guerrillas ambushed a US military convoy with rocket-propelled grenades yesterday, killing one soldier and wounding three amid growing calls for a United Nations force to pacify the country.

A car exploded near the main British military base in Basra yesterday but there were no casualties, witnesses said.