Gunmen targeting streams of Shiite Muslim pilgrims heading for the holy city of Karbala shot and killed three people on Friday morning and wounded two others in a Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Baghdad, police reported. Elsewhere, a bomb left on a minibus killed two people, and the bodies of four Sunni men were found in Shiite east Baghdad, as tensions between the Muslim sects heighten across strife-torn Iraq. Tens of thousands of devout Shiites are converging on the holy site for Monday's celebration of Arbaeen, marking the end of the 40-day mourning period after the date of the death of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, killed in Karbala in 680 A.D.The prospect of attacks on Shiite pilgrims had led the U.S. command to reinforce the American troop presence here. A battalion of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, about 700 troops, was dispatched to Iraq from its base in Kuwait to provide extra security for Shiite holy cities.
Groups of Shiite faithful, many parents with children in tow, trekked down Baghdad streets on Friday, headed for the southbound highway and Karbala, the shrine city 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of here. At about 7:30 a.m., a BMW sedan driving alongside pilgrims in the western Baghdad district of Adil opened fire, killing three and wounding two, said police Lt. Thair Mahmoud. Further details, including identities and ages of the victims, were not immediately available. Police later reported a second incident, also in western Baghdad, in which armed men riding in a car fired on pilgrims near Um al-Tuboul Square, wounding three. The killings were at least the second fatal attack during this holy period. On Tuesday, a roadside bomb exploded among Shiite pilgrims near Baqouba, north of Baghdad, killing one and wounding seven.
At about 1 p.m. on Friday, a plastic bag of explosives covered by cucumbers and tomatoes blew up on a minibus in a Shiite district, killing two passengers and wounding four, said police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi. Police said the bag had been left there by a departing passenger.
In the continuing cycle of apparent reprisal killings, police in a Shiite area of east Baghdad late Thursday found the bodies of four Sunni men who had been seized from a taxi the day before in western Baghdad. Victims' relatives said the driver told them masked gunmen in black clothes stopped his taxi and abducted the four after seeing their identification cards from Azamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad. In another example of the nonstop violence afflicting much of Iraq, six mortar rounds landed on six houses at 1 p.m. Friday in a mixed Sunni-Shiite area of Khan Bani Saad, 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Baghdad, killing one person and wounding three others, police reported.