20 die as insurgents in Iraq target Shiites
BAGHDAD: Iraqi insurgents struck at Shiite civilians for a third day, killing at least 20 people, among them worshippers leaving a mosque in central Iraq shortly after Friday prayers, police officials said.
A suicide car bomber blew himself up outside the al-Rasol al-Atham mosque in Tuz Khormato, a city about 200 kilometers, or 124 miles, north of Baghdad, killing 13 worshippers, most of them followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric, said Azad Khorshid, a doctor in the city.
An additional 28 people were wounded by the blast, said Khorshid, who helped treat them.
The bombing was another in a pattern of strikes aimed at Shiites. On Wednesday, more than 160 Iraqis were killed in explosions across Baghdad, terrifying Iraqi civilians and largely paralyzing the capital.
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia claimed responsibility for the attacks, and an Internet audiotape, purporting to be from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the group's leader, declared a "full-scale war" on Iraqi Shiites.
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On Friday morning in Baghdad, insurgents fired from a car at a group of such laborers, people who come from the south to earn as little as $4 a day in tea shops and on construction sites in Baghdad.
Two were killed and 12 were wounded, a Ministry of Interior official said. On Wednesday, 114 laborers were killed when a bomber lured them to a minivan with promises of work and then detonated it.
In other violence, in Iskandariya, a town 60 kilometers south of Baghdad, men raided the house of a town official early Friday, shooting to death the official, Amer al-Khafagi, and four of his bodyguards.
Local officials have been prime targets for the insurgency, which has said it considers any Iraqi cooperating with the American effort a traitor.
In continuing violence against the Iraqi Army and the police, three police officers were killed when a car bomb exploded near their convoy shortly before 10 a.m. in the town of Haswa, just south of Baghdad; three police officers were wounded.
A U.S. Marine was killed by what the marines called an "indirect fire" explosion in Ramadi, a city west of Baghdad in the Sunni Arab province of Anbar.
