BAGHDAD — Marching under blood-spattered banners, mourners Wednesday carried coffins through streets still littered with pieces of flesh and debris, as the death toll from three consecutive days of attacks on Shiite Muslim pilgrims climbed to 188.
At least 30 people were killed Wednesday in attacks on some of the more than 1 million pilgrims streaming to the holy city of Karbala for weekend rites commemorating the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad and one of Shiite Islam's holiest figures.
Overwhelmed health officials said a lack of blood, medicine and ambulances to respond to the carnage contributed to the escalating toll.
The persistent attacks on Shiite Muslims came despite a major U.S. and Iraqi crackdown in Baghdad, which officials believe has contributed to a drop in nightly execution-style killings blamed mostly on Shiite militiamen.
Police in Baghdad said they found 10 unidentified bodies Wednesday. Before the security plan was launched Feb. 13, the number often exceeded 30 a day.
The deployment of thousands of extra troops in Baghdad, however, has not deterred the bombings, drive-by shootings and other attacks blamed on Sunni Arab insurgents.
In Balad Ruz, a religiously mixed town northeast of the capital, a suicide bomber walked into a cafe frequented by members of the ethnic Kurdish minority and blew himself up before dusk Wednesday, police said. At least 26 people were killed and 30 injured in the blast.
Three U.S. soldiers were killed and another was injured when a bomb exploded during efforts to clear explosives from a road northwest of the capital, the military said.
The deaths lifted the number of U.S. personnel killed in the war to 3,188, according to the website icasualties.org, which tracks casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint set up to protect pilgrims along a busy southern highway, killing 22 people, 12 of them police officers, a U.S. military statement said. Another bomb and scattered shootings directed at pilgrims killed eight people, police said.
In Hillah, where two suicide bombers killed at least 117 people and injured 170 Tuesday, a procession of mourners carried 23 coffins through the streets. Some waved banners stained with the blood of the victims, chanting, "This is the blood of Hussein's martyrs."
