BAGHDAD — Two car bombs in Iraq’s capital killed at least 26 people Saturday on the last day of a Shiite pilgrimage already hit by multiple bombings.
The blasts, one in a heavily guarded area close to a revered shrine, raised the week’s death toll to more than 100 and cast further doubt on the divided government’s ability to secure the country after the American withdrawal.
Black plumes of smoke filled the sky over Baghdad’s northern Kadimiyah neighborhood, where the shrine to eighth-century saint Imam Moussa al-Kadhim draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year.
One of the bombs tore into throngs of people who packed the streets nearby, carrying aloft symbolic coffins and beating their chests in mourning to mark his martyrdom.
Three days before, nearly two dozen coordinated bombs across the country killed 72 people. Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate on Saturday claimed responsibility for that attack, which marked one of the deadliest days in Iraq since the last U.S. troops left in December.
The fierce wave of bombings targeting Shiites suggest that the al-Qaeda-allied Sunni militants are stepping up their periodic attacks to try to exploit sectarian cracks in the elected government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and possibly spark another round of the violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that brought Iraq to the brink of civil war only a few years ago.
The sheer number of blasts during the al-Kadhim pilgrimage shows the ability of al-Qaeda to retain and perhaps rebuild its bombings networks despite heavy blows struck to the organization by U.S. forces and allied Sunni militias prior to the American withdrawal.
The bombers’ ability to penetrate so close to the shrine indicates the challenges faced by Iraq’s security forces in securing huge religious gatherings.
“Those behind the attacks, they’ve become more determined now and see more of an opportunity because of the dysfunctional political process,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center and an analyst on regional politics.
The first car bomb went off just after noon, hidden in a taxi parked among a group of other cabs along the procession route. It killed 14 people including two police officers and wounded 46 others, a police official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
An hour later, a second parked car exploded in the Kadimiyah neighborhood itself, about three miles from the al-Kadhim mosque. At least 12 people were killed and 26 were wounded, the police official said.
