Attack at Kufa mosque kills 25

KUFA, Iraq – A mortar attack on the main mosque in the Iraqi city of Kufa killed 25 people and wounded 60 others today, hospital officials and witnesses said.

Thousands of people were crowded around the mosque at the time and ambulances raced to the scene to take scores of wounded to a nearby hospital. Dead bodies lay around the mosque compound, witnesses said.

The crowd was made up of supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who had gathered to march on the nearby city of Najaf, according to Reuters.

The attack comes on the same day Iraq’s most prominent Shiite Muslim religious leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al Sistani, who made a dramatic return to Iraq on Wednesday after medical treatment in London, planned to lead thousands of followers on a march to Najaf in a bid for peace.

“He will march with thousands of his sons to the holy city of Najaf in order to save it from the real tragedy that Najaf is going through,” Hamed al Khafaf, Sistani’s spokesman in Lebanon, said on the Al-Jazeera television network.

Hussam al-Husseini, an aide to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, said one mortar shell hit the Kufa mosque itself and two others hit near the mosque gates.

Mohammed AbdelKhadum, an official at al-Furat al-Awsat hospital in Kufa, said 25 people were killed and 60 injured.

It was unclear who fired the mortars. U.S. forces have battled Shiite insurgents loyal al-Sadr in Najaf for three weeks.

In the past, al-Sadr has regularly used the mosque to deliver sermons at Friday prayers.

In Baghdad, many Iraqis – Sunni Muslim and Shiite – welcomed Sistani’s arrival, saying he could best end the clash that’s pitted American forces and Iraqi police against followers of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in intense fighting over the last three weeks.

Yet Sistani’s arrival – and the possibility that thousands of his followers might converge on battle-torn Najaf – could prove an unwelcome development for the interim Iraqi government and its U.S. supporters. Large crowds of demonstrators in Najaf could thwart American military activities and provide cover for al-Sadr’s fighters to escape.

In what could be a grim foreshadowing of the massive demonstration, violence at a smaller gathering Wednesday killed two Sistani supporters and wounded five outside an American base in the southern holy city. Observers at the scene, including an Iraqi man working for Knight Ridder, said Iraqi police fired on the unarmed demonstrators as they approached the base chanting for an end to the bloodshed.

In a separate demonstration, at least 1,500 Shiites loyal to al-Sadr tried to enter Najaf, but were warned away by the Mahdi Army militiamen they’d come to support.

Angry Iraqi police also rounded up more than 60 Arab and Western journalists at gunpoint in Najaf, and forced them to go to the police station to listen to complaints about news coverage from Police Chief Ghaleb Hashem al Jazairi.

How Sistani would proceed to end the crisis was unclear Wednesday night, as he had yet to issue a formal decree, or fatwa, expressing his intentions.

In the past, Sistani has shied away from confronting al-Sadr, who nominally respects Sistani’s seniority in the Shiite religious hierarchy. The popularity al-Sadr has gained among poor, uneducated Shiites by confronting the United States and the interim Iraqi government would make it extremely difficult for Sistani to change that stance now.

Sistani is a political moderate, supporting democratic government and opposing an Iranian-style theocracy. While generally staying in the background, he’s thwarted American efforts to impose political solutions on Iraq several times, and has been a lukewarm supporter, at best, of the U.S.-backed plan to move toward a democratic government by entrusting an appointed interim government.

Any success by Sistani at ending the fighting in Najaf could further undermine the authority of the U.S.-supported interim government led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whose efforts so far have failed to defuse the crisis.

“Nobody disobeys Sistani, even during the tyranny of Saddam,” said Sabir Abu Ali, 67, a trustee of the al Zuwiya Husseni, a Shiite mosque in Baghdad.

“He has a very high stature by God. Whoever disobeys him will be harmed by God.”