At least 73 worshippers were killed on Friday in suicide attacks on two Shi’ite mosques in an eastern town near the border with Iran, the latest deadly strike by rebels on Iraq’s majority religious group.
The attack in the Shi’ite Kurdish town of Khanaqin, which came just hours after suicide bombers killed six people outside a Baghdad hotel, destroyed the two mosques, according to the interior ministry, and left 85 people wounded.
The two suicide bombers, wearing explosives belts, blew themselves up in the midst of worshippers during Friday’s weekly prayers in the two Shi’ite mosques, officials said.
The local authorities immediately imposed a curfew in Khanaqin, a majority Shi’ite Kurdish town about 170km from the capital. The attacks came less than a month ahead of December 15 legislative elections.
The attack was the latest in a line of bloody strikes against the Shi’ites since the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Sunni, declared all-out war on the Shi’ites in mid-September.
It also appeared to target Kurds after their political leaders teamed up with Shi’ite Arabs to help draft the new Constitution, which proved deeply unpopular with the minority Sunni Arabs, who dominated under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime.
Just hours earlier, at least six people were killed, including a woman and two children, and 40 hurt in Baghdad when suicide bombers detonated an explosives-ladden minivan and a car outside the Hamra hotel, frequented by foreigners, and near an interior ministry complex.
The complex, in southern Baghdad’s Jadriyah district, came to public notice on Sunday when United States troops discovered there 179 mostly Sunni detainees, several of whom had been tortured.
The discovery led to an international outcry, a stern warning by US authorities and promises by the Iraqi government to investigate the matter.
United Nations human rights chief Louise Arbour on Friday called for an international probe of detention conditions in Iraq.
”In light of the apparently systemic nature and magnitude of that problem, and the importance of public confidence in any inquiry, I urge the authorities to consider calling for an international inquiry,” said the UN high commissioner for human rights.
Other violence
Elsewhere, the US military said on Friday it had killed 32 rebels after more than 50 of them had launched a series of concerted attacks on Thursday against military outposts in Ramadi, west of Baghdad.
An Iraqi soldier and a US marine were lightly wounded, it said in a statement.
”The attacks were planned to coincide simultaneously; however, once initiated, the attacks lacked coordination,” the military said.
US forces also reported the death on Thursday of a US soldier in a road crash near the north-western town of Tal Afar, the 13th American serviceman to die in the country over a three-day period.
At least 2 083 US military personnel have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP tally based on the independent Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.
Senior US officers believe the level of violence will increase in the run-up to the December election, at a time when military analysts suggest about 3 000 foreigners are now fighting alongside home-grown insurgents.
”This level of chaos and violence is going to increase, almost in spite of what we do, between now and the election,” according to a senior US commander in Iraq, interviewed before the latest attacks.
In Washington, a US military analyst, citing a study drawing on Saudi and other regional intelligence, suggested that as many as 3 000 foreigners are involved in the insurgency.
Algerians constituted the highest percentage of the foreign fighters, about 20%.
They are followed by Syrians, Yemenis, Sudanese, Egyptians and Saudis, said Anthony Cordesman, an expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
”If there are anything like 3 000 foreign fighters in Iraq, this poses a serious threat,” Cordesman said.
But ”the exact numbers are largely irrelevant. All it takes is enough volunteers to continue to support suicide attacks and violent bombings, and to seek to drive Iraqi Sunnis towards a major and intense civil war,” he said.
Should civil war break out, Iraqi Kurds would have no choice but to proclaim independence, one of their leaders, Massud Barzani, told Turkey’s NTV television.
”May God save us from civil war, but if others start fighting among themselves and there is an outbreak, we will have no other alternative,” said the president of northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. — Sapa-AFP