BAGHDAD, Iraq – A bomb exploded in a car parked 10 yards from a Sunni Muslim mosque Friday, killing eight worshippers in Iraq’s deadliest attack of a week otherwise marked by conciliatory words between leaders of feuding religious sects.
The midday blast hit worshippers leaving the Iskan Shaabi mosque after the main weekly prayer service in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood. Witnesses said bodies flew through the air and nearby cars went up in flames, sending smoke through the mosque’s shattered windows. At least 22 other people were wounded.
No group claimed responsibility. A Sunni Arab political party blamed foreign elements of the Sunni-led insurgency, which is divided over whether to continue targeting civilians in its campaign against U.S. forces and Iraq’s Shiite Muslim-led government.
Two Marines died, meanwhile, after their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb Thursday near the beleaguered city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. military announced.
Iraq’s electoral commission certified final results of the Dec. 15 election, setting the stage for U.S.-backed talks aimed at bringing minority Sunnis into a broad-based government and undercutting the insurgency.
In the run-up to the talks, Shiite and Sunni leaders have tempered their words and insurgents have diminished the scale of violence.
During Friday prayers at Baghdad’s Um Qura mosque, normally a font of hard-line Sunni rhetoric, Sheik Ali Sanad offered rare words of affection for Imam Hussein, the Shiite saint commemorated in Thursday’s Ashura festivities. Sanad called on Sunnis and Shiites to honor Hussein’s legacy by “stopping the bloodshed in Iraq … through honest dialogue.”
The gesture echoed a call Wednesday by the leader of the largest Shiite party, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, for greater respect for human rights by Iraq’s Shiite-led police forces, whose violent raids, arbitrary detentions and alleged summary executions have enraged the Sunnis.
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