Mourners flock to funerals of Iraq stampede victims
Thousands of people in Baghdad and its surroundings today flocked to the funerals of nearly 1,000 Shiite pilgrims killed in a mass stampede during a religious procession.
Iraq’s Ministry of Interior today announced that a total of 953 people had died and 815 were injured in the crush on a bridge in north Baghdad. But Health Ministry spokesman Qassim Yahya said 843 had been killed and 439 were injured. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the two counts.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari visited Kadhimiya hospital where many of the victims were taken. He was accompanied by the ministers of defence and health.
The government proclaimed a three-day period of mourning after the disaster, which appeared to have been sparked by a rumour that a suicide bomber was among the more than one million people gathering at a Shiite shrine in the capital.
Most of the victims on Imams bridge were trampled or crushed in the midday stampede. Others plunged 30 feet into the muddy Tigris river.
The tragedy occurred during the annual commemoration of the death in the year 799 of Imam Moussa ibn Jaafar al-Kadhim, one of the 12 principle Shiite saints. He is buried in a mosque in the nearby neighbourhood of Kazimiyah.
In Baghdad’s Medical City hundreds of people were searching for their dead relatives. Many of the bodies were strewn on the floor outside the hospital’s morgue, which itself was packed with corpses.
Crowds also gathered at the Imam Ali Hospital in Baghdad’s eastern Sadr City district. Dozens of bodies were identified and taken away for burial by their relatives, medical workers said.
Most of the inhabitants of the impoverished district were Shiites who had moved to the capital from the countryside in the past several decades.
Many families erected large tents on Sadr City streets – a traditional venue for mourners to come to pay respect to the dead.
Some of the dead were being taken to Wadi al-Salam, or The Valley of Peace, a cemetery in the southern city of Najaf that is thought to be the world’s largest. Shiites believe that burial there, close to the shrine of Imam Ali, a 7th century Shiite saint, will bless the souls of the dead and secure their passage to heaven.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, told state-run Iraqiya television that “the government should take measures for an honest investigation to determine how failures doubled the casualties”.
Since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, the Shiite political parties have encouraged huge turnouts at religious festivals to display the majority sect’s power in the new Iraq. Sunni religious extremists have often targeted the gatherings to foment sectarian war, but that has not stopped the Shiites.
The ceremonies have often been chaotic, with huge crowds overtaxing the ability of police and security services to protect them. Television reports said about 1 million pilgrims from Baghdad and outlying provinces had gathered near the shrine yesterday.
In Baghdad, the crowd was on edge because of the 110-degree heat, a mortar barrage near the Kadhim shrine where they were headed and the ever-present fear of suicide bombers, etched into memories after repeated attacks against large religious gatherings. Seven people died in the mortar barrage three hours before the stampede, the US military said.
Police later said they found no explosives at the bridge – either on any individual or in any cars parked nearby. Instead, poor crowd control and the climate of fear in Iraq after years of bullets, bombings and bloodshed appeared largely to have caused the horrific carnage.
Marchers jammed up at a checkpoint at the western edge of the Imams bridge, which has been closed to civilians for months to prevent movement by extremists between the Shiite neighbourhood of Kazimiyah and the Sunni district of Azamiyah across the river.
“This tragedy was the direct result of terrorism; hundreds of innocent people, mostly women and children, have died because of the fear and panic that terrorists are sowing in Iraq,” said Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
The head of the country’s major Sunni clerical group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, told Al-Jazeera television that yesterday’s disaster was “another catastrophe and something else that could be added to the list of ongoing Iraqi tragedies.”
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