Eight killed as Iraq Shi'ites converge on festival

KERBALA, Iraq, Sep 8 (Reuters) Mortars killed eight people as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims today converged on an Iraqi holy city for a religious festival where Shi'ite leaders renewed demands for sweeping new powers in their region.

Organisers, who say visitors to Kerbala could reach 2 million by tomorrow's climax, said a heavy security presence by police and Iraqi troops had so far succeeded in keeping out the Sunni al Qaeda suicide bombers who have hit previous rituals.

''The situation now is very good,'' said Kerbala police chief Brigadier Abdul Razzak al-Taie. ''If conditions continue like this through the night then we will have succeeded.'' Suppressed under Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led secular regime, Shi'ite Muslim rites like this week's Shaabaniya, which celebrates the birth of a 9th century imam, are hugely popular now that the Shi'ite majority is enjoying political dominance.

Thousands of the faithful streamed through the streets of Kerbala, 110 km south of Baghdad, headed to shrines, praying and chanting and joining in outdoor feasts.

Four people were killed and six wounded by mortars on the road near Mussayab, just north of the city. Four others were killed and 34 wounded in two other attacks over the past day.

Worshippers also heard Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the biggest Shi'ite Islamist political party SCIRI, repeat demands for legislation to let the mainly Shi'ite regions of the oil-rich south merge into an autonomous federal region.

''Yes, Yes to Federalism!'' men chanted as Hakim poured scorn on his old enemy: ''Where is he now, Saddam, the vile?'' SCIRI-supported proposal for legislation on the mechanics of federalism caused uproar in parliament yesterday before an agreement among the factions to delay a constitutional deadline for passing a law. Sunnis want last year's constitution amended.

''Everyone has the right to enjoy federalism,'' Hakim told the crowd. His vision of a Shi'ite ''super-region'' with freedoms like those of the Kurds in the north also troubles US officials, who say it could fall under hostile Iranian Shi'ite influence.

US TROOP NUMBERS UP Sectarian violence, and friction between Arabs and ethnic Kurds over the northern oilfield, has been killing some 100 people a day, the United Nations estimates. US officials have joined Iraqi leaders in warning of a risk of civil war.

With an eye to their own withdrawal, US troops are training an Iraqi army. They handed formal command of it to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki yesterday. But they have also sent in reinforcements to Baghdad hoping to suppress the worst of the violence in the mixed city at the heart of the state.

With US troop numbers now at 145,000, up 14 percent since July, commanders say they pushed down the death rate in the capital in August by surging through problem neighbourhoods in large numbers.

Monthly figures from the Baghdad morgue show a drop of 17 percent to 1,536 bodies brought in, the UN said.

Though less than the decline of over 40 percent in killings mentioned by US and Iraqi officials for August, a full picture of violence against civilians will not be clear until the Health Ministry publishes data on other deaths, said Gianni Magazzini, the United Nations' human rights representative in Iraq.

Total civilian deaths from violence were estimated at over 3,000 in July by various officials. Partial August data from the Health Ministry last week showed a decline of about a quarter.

A car bomb attack on one of Baghdad's local police chiefs today killed a policeman and a bystander and police found six tortured and bound victims of death squad killers.

Maliki's four-month-old national unity coalition is racing against time to bring down sectarian tension, partly by bringing Sunnis into government. Al Qaeda renewed its threat of violence against Sunnis who join the US-backed political process.

The latest of several prominent tribal leaders in the Sunni north and west was gunned down in Hawija, near Kirkuk. Ibrahim al-Khalaf, chief of the Bagara tribe and a city councilman, was killed today in a drive-by shooting, a security source said.

The previous evening Al Jazeera television broadcast what it said was a tape of supposed Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, warning Sunni politicians: ''Our swords ... thirst for more of your rotting heads. You have lied to yourself and betrayed your nation.'' REUTERS SBA LS RAI2206