Explosives packed in vehicles tore through crowds gathered in Iraq's two most sacred Shiite cities Sunday, killing at least 60 people and wounding scores more in what many Iraqis fear may be a harbinger of the carnage promised by insurgents ahead of the country's Jan. 30 elections.
In Baghdad, about 30 gunmen dragged three election officials from their car in broad daylight and shot them. Elsewhere, 10 Iraqis working for the Sandi Group were kidnapped.
The day's violence left little doubt that the next six weeks until the Jan. 30 election will be bloody, as U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned.
Shiite leaders blamed Sunni insurgents for what they described as an attempt to ignite civil war, while former dictator Saddam Hussein issued an appeal from his prison cell for Iraqis to unite against what he called an American plot to divide the country.
The timing of the bombings and their location — in town centers, crowded with civilians, within walking distance of the tombs of Shiite Islam's most revered saints — suggested a broader attempt to strike fear into Iraq's majority Shiite community, which is looking forward to an election likely to produce a Shiite-dominated government for the first time in the country's history.
With macabre effect, the blasts demonstrated yet again that insurgents, usually operating in Baghdad and Sunni regions in central Iraq, could extend their deadly reach into the Shiite heartland.
"These attacks aim to destroy the country and the holy sites. This is terrorism against Shiites," said Fadhil Salman 41, the owner of the Ghufran Hotel in Najaf. "They want to foil the elections, but this won't deter us."
The bombings were the bloodiest episodes in a grim toll across Iraq on Sunday.
The blasts in Najaf and Karbala occurred about an hour apart. The first tore through a crowded bus station in Karbala at 1:30 p.m. At least 13 people were killed and about 50 were wounded, according to hospital officials. The explosives detonated about 300 yards from the twin gold-domed shrines of Hussein and Abbas, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims from Iraq, Iran and elsewhere. A police training academy was in the vicinity, news agencies said.
At 2:30 p.m., the second car bomb detonated in Najaf's Maidan Square, where a large crowd of people had gathered for the funeral procession of a tribal sheik. Hospital officials said 47 people were killed and at least 90 others wounded in the blast, which went off about 400 yards from the Imam Ali Shrine, the holiest Shiite site in Iraq.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for either attack. But in recent days, Iraqi officials had received reports of insurgents headed from Fallujah to Najaf.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned of a surge in violence before the Jan. 30 parliamentary elections. The Shiite religious leadership has sought to mobilize the community ahead of the vote, seeing it as the best opportunity for long-oppressed Shiites to gain power that reflects their majority status.
In the wake of the attacks, leading Shiite figures appealed for calm. The movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, a young cleric whose Mahdi Army militia has twice led uprisings against U.S. forces, condemned the attack and dismissed the prospect of sectarian strife.
"It is clear that there are some trying to impose conflict and civil war in Iraq," said Ali Yassiri, a top aide to al-Sadr. "Deceiving Iraqis is difficult."
He blamed the current violence on Saddam loyalists, followers of the Saudi-based fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, and terrorist groups like that of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"Karbala and Najaf are stable. They are ready to vote, so the terrorists targeted these cities," he said. "The insurgents want to show that there is no province of Iraq that is stable and no city they cannot strike."
Also Sunday, masked insurgents issued a videotape showing what they said were 10 abducted Iraqis who had been working for an American company, the Sandi Group, and said they would kill them unless the company withdrew from Iraq.