Attacks on Muslim Sabbath kill more than 20

A suicide car bomber struck worshippers leaving a Shiite mosque in Tuz Khormato in northern Iraq today, killing at least 10 people and wounding 21 others.

Elsewhere militants killed at least 12 people as the Sunni-dominated insurgency pressed its “all-out war” against the government and majority Shiite population.

The blast today, the Muslim day of prayer, extended two days of mayhem in Baghdad in which nearly 200 people were killed in bomb attacks. More than 600 were wounded in the stunning bombing rampage.

In today’s mosque attack, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle as worshippers left the Hussainiyat al-Rasoul al-Azam mosque in Tuz Khormato, 130 miles north of Baghdad, said police Colonel Sarhat Qader.

Earlier today, gunmen opened fire on day laborers in Baghdad, killing three and wounding a dozen in a drive-by shooting.

“We are innocent people working for just ten thousand or twelve thousand dinars (€5.80-€6.50) per day. Those criminals and terrorists came and did this to us,” said Salah Aziz Ali, a wounded worker.

Yesterday, suicide bombers killed at least 31 people in three suicide attacks targeting Iraqi police.

A day earlier, at least 167 people were killed and 570 wounded in more than a dozen bombings in Baghdad. The largest single toll resulted from a suicide bombing against day laborers in the largely Shiite Kazimiyah neighbourhood in north Baghdad.

The US military continued attacks on militant strongholds in western Iraq near the Syrian border where insurgents hold many towns and villages along the Euphrates River as it flows southeastward from the Syrian border.

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

The American military said US jets pounded an abandoned school used by Al Qaida in the town of Karabilah, about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad. Nine insurgents were killed in last night’s strike.

Before dawn today US jets were called in again to destroy what the military said was a bomb factory in Haditha, also along the Euphrates in western Iraq.

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

A car bomb also exploded near an Iraq police patrol in the town of Haswa, near Baghdad, killing three officers and wounding four, police Capt. Muthana Khalid said.

And in the Iskandariyah district, 30 miles south of Baghdad, gunmen broke into the house of the local mayor and shot him dead, after first killing his four bodyguards, Khalid said.

In the capital’s Shiite district of Sadr City, gunmen assassinated Sheik Fadil al-Lami, the cleric at the Imam Ali mosque at about noon as waited to fill his car’s petrol tank, said police Lt. Col. Shakir Wadi. Police also discovered the bodies of three people in the district, one an Iraqi soldier, Wadi said.

A mortar struck the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, which houses the Iraqi government, parliament and US Embassy. No casualties were reported, said police Maj. Falah al-Mhamadawi.

The US military also announced today that a Marine had been killed near the town of Ramadi, the volatile capital of Anbar Province that stretches west from Baghdad to the Syrian, Jordanian and Saudi borders.

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

“These spikes of violence are predictable around certain critical events that highlight the progress of democracy,” said Major General Rick Lynch, the chief American military spokesman.

Lynch said the joint Iraqi-American force of 8,500 killed 145 insurgents and captured 361 in the second operation in a year to rid Tal Afar of militants, including foreign fighters crossing from Syria.

Iraqi and US officials say the fighters sneak across the porous border with Syria and have accused the Damascus government of doing little to stop the influx. While Syria has repeatedly denied the charges, Iraqi officials have adopted an increasingly stronger tone, and the country’s defence minister has pledged that operations targeting the militants would be extended to other Euphrates River valley towns seen as militant safe havens.

“We will not retreat or be silent. There will be no room for you (insurgents) in all of Iraq. We will chase you wherever you go,” Defence Minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi, a Sunni, told reporters.

For the Iraqi leadership, the challenge has been to ward off a seemingly endless insurgent campaign while winning the support of the country ahead of the October 15 constitutional referendum and the trial of Saddam just days later.

Some leading Sunni Arab groups have condemned the attacks against civilians. And the Iraqi government, in a bid to deflect an escalation of Sunni-Shiite sectarian tensions, has stressed that foreign fighters are behind much of the worst violence in Iraq, pointing to the arrest of a Palestinian and a Libyan in Wednesday’s Kazimiyah attacks on day laborers as proof. The bomber, they said, was Syrian. The government gave no evidence to support those claims.

The massive bombings took place with both Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in the US.

“Today, Iraq is facing one of the most brutal campaigns of terror at the hands of the forces of darkness,” Talabani said, addressing the UN General Assembly with an appeal for international help.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press obtained the text of minor, final changes to Iraq’s draft constitution. The United Nations is to print the draft in Baghdad and insure its distribution before the referendum, but the world body said it was awaiting final approval. There were conflicting reports on when Iraq’s parliament would sign off on the document.