Pilgrims flee Iraq city as gun battles rage

Police ordered hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to leave the Iraqi city of Kerbala yesterday as a battle raged between Iraqi security forces and gunmen near two of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines.

A senior security source in Baghdad said 25 people had been killed, mostly policemen. The director of Kerbala's al-Hussein Hospital said it had received eight bodies and 29 wounded.

Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier-General Abdul Kareem Khalaf told state television that reinforcements were being rushed to Kerbala from Baghdad and neighbouring provinces. He said 50 people had been killed and wounded in the violence.

The fighting appeared to be between gunmen loyal to the fiery Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, possibly members of his Mehdi Army militia, and police linked to the rival Shi'ite political movement, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) and its Badr Organisation.

Police said a curfew had been imposed and pilgrims ordered to leave the city, 110 kilometres south of Baghdad, bringing to an abrupt halt a major Shi'ite festival that was to have run for two days until today.

"They came in big buses and now police are forcing them to return on these buses," said one local police official.

Many of the pilgrims had also walked from Baghdad and elsewhere to mark the ninth century birth of Mohammad al-Mahdi, the last of 12 imams Shi'ites revere as saints.

Iraq's security forces had originally feared that Sunni Islamist al Qaeda might try to launch a large-scale attack on the pilgrims to inflame sectarian tensions.

Reuters witnesses in the city could hear the sound of intense gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades being fired and saw columns of smoke rising from the centre of the city, apparently from cars that police said had been set ablaze.