BAQUBA, Iraq (AFP) — A suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque during a reconciliation meeting between two feared militias near Iraq's restive city of Baquba on Monday, killing at least 18 people.
The attack which left another 30 people wounded came just hours after Tehran closed its border with northern Kurdish region of Iraq in protest at the detention of an Iranian by US forces.
The suicide bomber struck in the mixed village of Shifta, outside Baquba, which had previously been seen as a symbol of unity between Iraq's divided Sunni and Shiite communities.
Baquba police officer Brigadier General Khudair al-Timimi said that was why the village had been chosen as the venue for the reconciliation meeting between the Shiite Mahdi Army militia and the Sunni Arab insurgent group, the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution.
The bomber detonated his explosive vest amid the assembled dignitaries after they had attended the evening iftar meal that breaks the daytime fast observed by Muslims during Ramadan.
Tamimi said seven police officers from Baquba were among the dead, three of them senior ones.
He said they included Brigadier General Najib al-Saleh, head of the police operation centre for Diyala province, and Brigadier General Ali Dlayan, the Baquba city police chief.
Timimi added that Ahmed al-Timimi, head of Shiite religious endowments in Baquba, was also among the dead.
Doctor Hom Suhail of the Baquba health directorate said ambulances were still bringing in the dead and wounded.
An AFP photographer near the site said US helicopters were flying overhead as ambulances rushed to the scene.
Timimi said the militiamen were largely from four nearby villages.
The Mahdi Army fighters were from the Shiite towns of Al-Huwaider and Kharinabat, while the Sunni Arab insurgents came from Boh Ruz and Taherer.
Over the past few months the Brigades of 1920 Revolution have joined the US military in fighting rival Sunni militants loyal to Al-Qaeda. A US commander in Baquba last month called them "patriots".
In other violence on Monday, insurgents killed a further 10 people across Iraq, including six in a suicide truck bombing in the northern town of Tal Afar, Iraqi officials said.
The suicide bombing came after Iran closed its border with northern Iraq's Kurdish region in protest at the detention of an Iranian Mahmudi Farhadi who had been visiting Iraq.
The US military charges that Mahmudi Farhadi is an officer in the covert operations arm of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, accused by American commanders of helping Shiite militias involved in Iraq's bloody sectarian conflict.
"We have closed the border and we hope the Iraqi authorities will act as quickly as possible to release our colleague," the governor of Iran's northwestern Kordestan province, Esmaeel Najar, told AFP.
"We had said that if he (Farhadi) was not freed rapidly, we would reconsider our commercial ties" with the Iraqi Kurdish region, Najar added.
Asked when the border would reopen, he replied: "We hope that the Iraqi authorities will act as swiftly as possible to free our colleague."
Iran has made clear that it regards Iraq's sovereignty as being at stake in Farhadi's continued custody after both the regional and national authorities said he had been visiting with their consent.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurd, had warned senior US officials on Saturday that Iran was poised to close the border over the Farhadi affair.
In an indignant letter to General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, and US ambassador Ryan Crocker, Talabani said the arrest of Farhadi who came at the invitation of the Kurdish authorities was "a humiliation for the regional administration."
The row comes as Iran intensifies its pressure on the Iraqi authorities to close the rearbases of separatist Kurdish guerrillas active in the Islamic republic's western provinces.
On Saturday, Iran confirmed for the first time that it had shelled suspected positions inside Iraq of the PJAK (Party of Free Life of Kurdistan), a rebel group linked to Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
"Some of their bases are 10 kilometres (six miles) deep inside Iraqi territory so this is part of our natural right to secure our borders," General Yayha Rahim Safavi, military adviser to the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in an interview with Iranian television.
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