Iraq attacks kill 20 during Shi’ite ceremony

BAGHDAD - Suicide bombings of two Shi'ite mosques in Baghdad killed at least 17 people as thousands of Iraq's newly empowered majority sect marked Ashura, the main event in their religious calendar.

Separately, a rocket landed near a police station and close to a mosque in a Shi'ite district of northwestern Baghdad, killing three people and wounding five in a shop, police said.

Hours later a suicide bomber killed two policemen and a member of the Iraq National Guard in Baghdad, a police official said.

In the first suicide attack, a man wearing an explosives- packed vest merged into a crowd near a mosque in the Doura area of southwestern Baghdad and blew himself up, survivors said. The blast killed 15 people and wounded 33, Yarmouk hospital said.

Soon afterwards, an explosion shook a second Shi'ite mosque in western Baghdad, the US military and police sources said.

Police said two suicide bombers had approached a crowd outside the mosque. They were spotted by police, who shot them, but one still blew himself up, killing at least two people.

Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, told CNN he believed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who is al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, was behind the attacks. Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for many of Iraq's worst strikes.

The attacks came as thousands of Shi'ites marched through the city for Ashura, a day after a Shi'ite alliance was confirmed as winner of last month's historic election, handing power for the first time to the long oppressed community. A majority of Sunni Muslims abstained from the polls.

A total of 32 Iraqis were killed.

In Kirkuk, a blast killed a man at a Shi'ite-Turkman mosque. The army said it was a suicide bomber blowing himself up, but locals said the man who died was a mosque guard who was investigating a suspicious package when it exploded.

The attacks recalled Ashura last year, when 170 people were killed in a series of suicide bombings in Baghdad and Kerbala, a holy city to the south of Baghdad where the Ashura ritual, commemorating a 7th century martyr, is most intense.

Dressed in black for mourning and holding aloft green banners bearing the name Hussein, the martyred grandson of the prophet Mohammed, thousands filled central Baghdad for the Ashura march, some of them flailing themselves with chains.

Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the main party in the Shi'ite alliance that won the Jan. 30 election, addressed the crowd with a message of political conciliation.

"I call on all Iraqis to unite and I assure everyone the Iraq we want is a unified and secure Iraq where every citizen, without exception, enjoys justice and equality," Hakim told the crowd, which chanted "Hussein, Hussein" and "God is Greatest."

"We say it now and we will always say it, that we are open to all Iraqis, because they are partners in this nation," he said, in one of the strongest declarations yet of Shi'ite intentions to include Sunnis in the political process.

Most members of the Sunni Muslim sect that had dominated Iraq for decades until a US-led invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 did not vote in the poll and they will barely be represented in the new 275-seat National Assembly.

Mohsen al-Hakim, political adviser to Abdul-Aziz, said he expected more attacks on Shi'ites during Ashura. "Yes honestly, we are expecting that attacks might increase today and tomorrow," he told Reuters. But he said the community would not be provoked into a violent response.

GOVERNMENT IN WORKS

Iraq's Electoral Commission announced Thursday that the main Shi'ite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, had secured 140 seats in the assembly, just enough for a slim majority.

A Kurdish alliance came second and will have 75 seats, while a list headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite, will have 40. Sunni Arabs have fewer than 10 seats.

Talks have been going on for two weeks over who will take the top government positions, with the Kurds expected to get the presidency and the Shi'ite bloc the prime minister's post.

The front runner for premier is physician Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a religious Shi'ite and leader of the Dawa Party, but Ahmad Chalabi, another former exile and former Pentagon favorite, is also pushing his candidacy.

Whoever ends up as prime minister faces the daunting task of improving security in a country plagued by suicide bombings and abductions - two Indonesian journalists were reported missing in western Iraq Friday and were believed kidnapped.

In Samarra, north of Baghdad, the bodies were found of six Iraqi soldiers who had been kidnapped a week ago and shot in the head. Two policemen who had worked as guards at a power station were killed in a separate attack, army and police sources said.

Three US soldiers were killed in separate attacks in and near the northern city of Mosul Thursday and a fourth died in a roadside bomb blast north of Baghdad Friday, raising to 1,118 the number killed in action since March 2003.

- REUTERS