Witnesses reported that the fighting this week began with Mahdi militiamen hurling rocks, bricks and knives at local police and quickly escalated into an exchange of rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 fire.
Iraqi authorities ordered a curfew for the besieged city 50 miles south of Baghdad as well as for Najaf and Hillah, other Badr strongholds in the region, and sent buses to begin evacuating pilgrims.
"I am stuck in Karbala near the governorate building where I'm hearing a heavy exchange of gunfire," a pilgrim from Najaf, who did not want to be identified, said by cellphone from where he was taking cover about 200 yards from the Imam Hussein shrine. He reported that gunmen set fire to the nearby hotels after militiamen holed up inside fired on local police and Iraqi army troops. Pilgrims had also taken refuge in the buildings to escape stray gunfire.
As the violence escalated despite the Iraqi government's deployment of 15,000 security troops, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed the U.S. mission to bring peace to Iraq a failure that has produced a power vacuum. He observed that Iran and other countries in the region were "prepared to fill that void." It was not immediately clear whether he was speaking in reaction to the Karbala situation or making a general condemnation of the U.S. presence in Iraq.
"The political power of the occupiers has been destroyed," Ahmadinejad told reporters at a news conference in Tehran. "Rapidly and very soon we will witness a great void in the region, and we and our friends, along with Saudi Arabia and the nation of Iraq, are prepared to fill that void."
The Pentagon has sent 28,500 additional U.S. troops to Iraq over the last six months, but civilian deaths from sectarian fighting, assassinations and militia power struggles have continued. The violence has thwarted U.S. aims of turning over responsibility for security to the Iraqi government, whose police and army ranks are often overwhelmed, or infiltrated, by more powerful and better armed militias.
The violence convulsing Karbala had killed 51 and injured 206 by nightfall, said an Interior Ministry official here who asked not to be named. It was unclear whether that figure included 11 people killed over the previous two days as pilgrims made their way to Karbala along roads teeming with snipers. Four pilgrims died in the first gun battle near the shrine late Monday.
