Gunmen kill leading Iraq cleric’s aide

GUNMEN killed an aide to Iraq’s most influential Shi’ite cleric and two bodyguards in a drive-by shooting outside a Baghdad mosque yesterday — an attack likely to stoke tensions between the Shi’ite majority and the Sunni minority, officials said.

Elsewhere in the capital, a car bomb exploded near a checkpoint outside offices of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s Islamic Dawa

Party, killing one person and injuring at least four more, officials said. Al-Jaafari was not there at the time.

Shi’ite cleric Kamal Ezz al-Deen al-Ghuraifi, an aide to leading Shi’ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was shot as he was about to leave al-Doreen mosque after leading prayers, according to his son, Hamid Kamal. Police Lt. Thair Mahmoud confirmed the attack.

“Gunmen in a speeding car sprayed him with machine guns,” Mahmoud said. Two bodyguards were killed and another four were wounded, he said.

Al-Ghuraifi, in his 60s, had been a Baghdad representative of al-Sistani for the past decade.

It was the third attack on al-Sistani aides in recent weeks.

Separately, five masked gunmen stormed a Sunni mosque in the same neighbourhood and kidnapped an imam, Sheik Amer al-Tikriti, during Friday prayers, police 1st Lt. Mohammed al-Hiyani said.

A Sunni-dominated insurgency has killed about 1,380 people since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his Shi’ite-dominated government April 28.

Islamic extremists, such as Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Qaida in Iraq group, are determined to start a civil war by attacking Iraqi security forces and members of the country’s Shi’ite majority.

In the attack on the Islamic Dawa Party offices in Baghdad’s Mansour neighbourhood, the suicide bomber detonated the car near a checkpoint about 24 metres from the building, which used to be al-Jaafari’s house.

Meanwhile, a roadside bomb targeting a US Marine convoy in the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi killed two civilians and wounded two others.

In Baghdad, Mayor Alaa Mahmoud al-Timimi’s threat to resign over the dismal state of the capital’s infrastructure is an indication of the daily misery that Baghdad’s 6.45 million people still endure more than two years after the US-led invasion. They are wracked not only by unrelenting bombings and kidnappings but serious shortages of water, electricity and fuel.

“It’s useless for any official to stay in office without the means to accomplish his job,” al-Timimi said Thursday.

Some people complain their water smells bad, and the mayor’s spokesperson acknowledged that in some areas, it gets mixed with sewage.