Iraq violence leaves 16 dead ahead of Shiite ceremony
BAGHDAD (AFP) — At least 16 people were killed across Iraq on Monday, including soldiers and four pilgrims, a day after a suicide bomber killed 48 Shiite pilgrims in an attack which US officials blamed on Al-Qaeda.
In a brazen late afternoon attack, armed men ambushed a passing Iraqi army patrol in the town of Bohruz, in the restive Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, said army Brigadier General Ragib al-Omairi, the regional commander.
Seven soldiers and an army major were killed in the ambush, Omairi said.
Earlier Monday, a group of Shiite pilgrims heading to the central city of Karbala for the Arbaeen religious ceremony was hit by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.
Four of them, including three women, were killed, while 15 others were wounded, security officials said.
Tens of thousands of Shiite faithful are vulnerable to attack as they walk to Karbala from across Iraq to attend the Arbaeen ceremony, which marks the 40th day after Ashura, when the slaying of a revered seventh century imam is marked.
Arbaeen this year falls on Thursday.
The attack came a day after at least 48 people were killed when a suicide bomber detonated a vest filled with explosives at a rest stop used by Shiite pilgrims on their way to Karbala, hospital and security officials said.
At least 68 people were also wounded in the attack in the town of Iskandiriyah, just south of Baghdad, medics in the nearby town of Hilla and police said.
The injured were treated in three different area hospitals, said a Hilla hospital doctor who declined to give his name.
The American embassy in Baghdad and US-led forces condemned the attack in a joint statement on Monday, blaming it on Al-Qaeda in Iraq but without saying how they reached this conclusion.
"We will work closely with the government of Iraq and their security forces to help bring the perpetrators of these attacks to justice," the statement said.
Iraq's Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, also condemned the attack, calling it "a new desperate attempt to undermine Iraqi unity and trigger sectarian strife.
"The criminal element behind this brutal and cruel incident directed by a foreign agenda will soon meet its end without any doubt at the hands of the Iraqi people."
Liwa Sumaisim, chief of the political bureau in Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's movement, also condemned the attack and urged Baghdad to "take tough measures to protect the pilgrims during the (Arbaeen) ceremony."
The US military said Iraqi and coalition troops were conducting extra foot patrols and setting up additional checkpoints in a bid to protect pilgrims heading to Karbala.
Shiite pilgrims marching to Karbala have often been targeted by Sunni insurgents in the past.
In a separate attack on Monday, a handicapped man in a wheelchair wearing an explosives vest blew himself up inside a police building in the central city of Samarra, killing three policemen including a general, officials told AFP.
The bomber came to meet Brigadier General Abdul Jabbar Saleh Rabia, the deputy head of security in Samarra, Iraqi officials said.
A security official in the city said the bomber, who had visited the general in the past, was allowed to enter the building without being searched.
A woman was also shot dead on Monday in Baquba, capital of Diyala province, police said.
