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Iraqi Shiite festival mostly peaceful

U.S. and Iraqi officials view the holy observance in Karbala as a test of efforts to cut violence.

BAGHDAD - Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims clambered aboard buses or began trekking homeward on foot Saturday at the end of Ashura, a 10-day ritual to cleanse the spirit and scourge the body in honor of their founding saint.

Despite two days of fighting that killed at least 72 people farther south and attacks north of Baghdad, the high holy days in Karbala passed absent the slaughter of pilgrims witnessed in recent years.

Fearing an attack on the masses of self-flagellating faithful who marched on the shrines in Karbala, Iraqi authorities flooded the city with 30,000 police and soldiers.

A relatively uneventful passage of Ashura had been seen by U.S. and Iraqi officials as a rigorous test of the decline in violence in the country since Washington sent in 30,000 additional troops last year and many Sunni insurgents joined American forces in the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq.

In Karabala, provincial Gov. Aqil al-Khazali said 2-million pilgrims passed peacefully through the holy city, home to the golden domed mosques of Imam Hussein and his half brother, Imam Abbas.

The festival, largely banned by Saddam Hussein and his minority Sunni Muslim regime, recalls the death of Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohammed, in a seventh century battle near Karbala. The combat defined the split between Islam's Sunni and Shiite sects.

Men wearing black or white robes danced in circles and chanted as they swayed in unison. They pounded their chests, slashed their heads and beat their bloodied foreheads with the flat sides of swords and knives.

While there was no catastrophic attack during Ashura, Sunni and Shiite militants kept up the steady, although diminished, level of violence Saturday in regions to the north. Bombs, suicide assaults, rockets and death squad murder left behind the corpses of at least 21 more Iraqis.

A rocket slammed into a busy market in the northern city of Tal Afar on Saturday, killing at least seven people, said Najim Abdullah, the mayor.

And two bombs hidden under trash blasted an Ashura procession in Kirkuk, killing at least two, said police Brig. Gen. Burhan Tayeb Taha.

In Basra and Nasiriyah, south of Karbala, authorities put the final death toll at 72 when fighting ended Saturday after security forces stormed a mosque and ousted holdout members of the Soldiers of Heaven cult.

The militants seek to invoke chaos as a means of inspiring the return of the "Hidden Imam" - also known as the Mahdi - a descendant of Mohammed who disappeared as a child in the ninth century. Shiites believe he will return one day to bring justice to the world.

[Last modified January 20, 2008, 01:30:26]