Beirut, Lebanon - Attackers killed 40 Shi'ite Muslim pilgrims in Iraq on Tuesday and Hezbollah's leader warned of the threat of civil war in Lebanon as tensions across the Middle East overshadowed the annual rite of Ashura.
In most of the Arab world the climax of the ritual, in which Shi'ites mourn the slaying over 13 centuries ago of the Prophet Mohammad's grandson Imam Hussein, went off peacefully.
But the talk from worshippers and preachers alike was of impending struggle and conflict.
At a huge Ashura gathering in Beirut's Shi'ite southern suburbs, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah accused President Bush of creating chaos in Lebanon.
In Saudi Arabia, hundreds of black-clad mourners from the kingdom's Shi'ite minority joined street processions. Some carried posters of Nasrallah, openly identifying with their Lebanese co-religionists.
"The fight against tyranny has come again," said a teenager who gave his name as Hussein as he marched in the Gulf coast town of Tarut. "With the political situation now and the corruption, we are making war on all oppressors."
Imam Hussein was killed in the year 680 in a conflict that entrenched a schism between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims that has never been healed.
Sectarian coexistence in the Middle East has been frayed by Sunni-Shi'ite bloodletting in Iraq, where thousands of people have been killed since an attack on a Shi'ite mosque in Samarra in February 2006, raising fears of all-out civil war.
Bombers struck twice on Tuesday. Thirteen people were killed and 39 wounded when a roadside bomb hit a Shi'ite procession in the town of Khanaqin northeast of Baghdad, police said.
Then a suicide bomber blew himself up among worshippers outside a Shi'ite mosque in Balad Ruz, about 80 km (50 miles) south of Khanaqin, killing 23 people and wounding 57.
Gunmen in Baghdad ambushed two minibuses carrying pilgrims back from shrines in Najaf, killing four and wounding nine.
TARGET FOR MILITANTS
Fearing a possible strike by insurgents, Iraqi authorities had deployed 11,000 police and soldiers in the holy Shi'ite city of Kerbala, the place where Imam Hussein died and the focus of the annual Ashura commemoration.
Ashura has been a target in the past for Sunni militants who view Shi'ites -- a majority in Iraq but a minority in the Muslim world -- as heretics. Suicide bombings and other attacks on Ashura crowds in Kerbala and Baghdad killed 171 people in 2004.
Hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims thronged the alleyways of Kerbala. Many waved green, red and black flags, while others beat their chests to the sound of drums and religious chants.
In Lebanon, Ashura ceremonies followed street clashes last week between the Hezbollah-led opposition and government supporters in which seven people were killed and 400 wounded.
The unrest, in which Sunnis confronted Shi'ites and Christians fought among themselves, reignited memories of the country's 1975-1990 civil war.
Nasrallah rejected an accusation by Bush on Monday that his Syrian- and Iranian-backed group was stirring trouble in Lebanon and said the U.S. president had inflamed matters.
"The one who fomented chaos in Lebanon, who destroyed Lebanon, who killed women and children, old and young in Lebanon, is George Bush," he said in a fiery speech.
Nasrallah accused Bush and Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice of ordering Israel to launch last year's war in Lebanon.
He also warned against the danger of domestic strife in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
"Today the biggest challenge facing all the resistance groups in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq is to avoid slipping into civil wars and internal strife, as the nation's enemies want."
Hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites marched through the streets, beating their chests in a sign of grief over Hussein's martyrdom and chanting "Death to America, death to Israel."
Predominantly Shi'ite Iran also marked Ashura, with some celebrants saying Hussein's death was an example for Iranians now to resist Western "oppression."
"Iran, with its religion, will stand against any Western oppression. We have no fear," Davoud Mohammadi, an 18-year-old student, said before watching a play of the battle of Kerbala in the village of Habibabad, near the central city of Isfahan.