Suicide bomber kills at least 12 Shi’ite worshippers at mosque

A SUICIDE car bomber struck as worshippers were leaving a Shi’ite mosque in a northern Iraqi town yesterday, killing at least 12 people.

Militants killed 12 other people across the country as the Sunni-dominated insurgency pressed its “all-out war” to destabilise the country.

The 24 deaths came during a third day of mayhem in which nearly 200 people were killed in bombings, mostly in Baghdad. More than 600 have been wounded in the stunning rampage by insurgents, including al-Qaida in Iraq.

Police subsequently captured a young man wearing a suicide bomb belt and heading toward a second mosque in Tuz Khormato. Authorities said the man identified himself as Muhammed Ali, a Saudi citizen.

In other violence, gunmen opened fire on day labourers in the capital, killing three and wounding a dozen.

The US military continued attacking militant strongholds in western Iraq along the Syrian border, where militants hold many towns and villages along the Euphrates River as it flows southeastward.

Al-Qaida in Iraq said the brutal bombings in Baghdad were reprisals for the joint Iraqi-US operation that pushed insurgents out of their stronghold in Tal Afar, also near the Syrian border in Iraq’s far north.

Two days earlier, al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi vowed to wage an “all-out war” on the country’s Shi’ite majority, calling its members collaborators of the “Jews and Crusaders.”

The spike in violence, US and Iraqi officials said, was not surprising. It was viewed as a campaign by the Sunni-dominated insurgency to derail the political process and the October. 15 referendum on the draft constitution. Sunnis, once the power brokers under Saddam Hussein’s regime, complain that the draft charter heavily favours Iraq’s Shi’ite and Kurdish populations.