BAGHDAD, 5 November 2005 — At least 15 Iraqis were killed in separate incidents across the country as Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari used the occasion of the Eid Al-Fitr holiday to urge insurgents to abandon their fight.

Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda warned diplomats in Baghdad to “pack their bags and leave” or face certain death, according to an Internet statement, a day after it threatened to kill two kidnapped Moroccan Embassy staffers.

The insurgents should “return to reason and take inspiration from the moral lessons of the Qur’an,” Jaafari said in a special Eid speech. “All monotheistic religions call for safeguarding human lives,” he said. “What fault does a child who is killed have?” he asked. Jaafari urged the insurgents to question the need for the civilian losses in their fight, and said that many of the insurgents “were misled.”

Fifteen Iraqis were killed in violence across the country yesterday, security and hospital sources reported. Six policemen were killed and 10 wounded in an early morning battle with insurgents at a checkpoint north of Baghdad, a security source said.

Men in cars approached the checkpoint near the town of Bohruz, 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Baghdad, and opened fire on police, sources said. Later in the day five police from the Thunder Brigade — one of the Interior Ministry’s elite commando units — were killed when a roadside bomb exploded. Three commandos were wounded.

Brigade Commander Ali Abdullah Al-Obeidi said the commandos were attacked near the town of Taza, some 230 kilometers (143 miles) north of Baghdad. Separately a home-made bomb exploded in the Dura neighborhood of Baghdad, killing a civilian and wounding eight others, hospital sources said. Also in Dura, three people were killed and six wounded when their bus slammed into the rear of a US tank on patrol, the Interior Ministry said.

In Sadr City, members of cleric Moqtada Sadr’s militia and Iraqi police maintained security for the thousands of faithful gathering for Friday prayers.

Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, along with Sadr and his supporters, began celebrating Eid on Thursday. But Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest Shiite religious authority in Iraq, had decreed that celebrations were to begin yesterday.

Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was again on the verbal offensive. “We reiterate our warning to those who insist on maintaining so-called diplomatic missions in Baghdad,” it said in a statement that could not be independently verified.

“Let them pack their bags and leave,” said the statement, signed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

Two Moroccan Embassy employees went missing Oct. 20 while driving between Amman and Baghdad.

On Thursday, Zarqawi’s group said it had decided to kill them after determining that they were “without doubt loyalists of the oppressors and elements of the apostate regime in Morocco.”

The US military, meanwhile, said two US soldiers died in Iraq on Thursday. The deaths bring to at least 2,031 the number of US military personnel who have died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

The US military yesterday also identified five people they said were leaders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, all killed in an Oct. 29 airstrike in the far western town of Husbayah.

The five dead include four cell leaders and Abu Raghad, described as “a North African terrorist” who was “the senior (Al-Qaeda) foreign fighter facilitator in the Al-Qaim region and an associate of Zarqawi.” Raghad “had contacts throughout the Middle East who were involved in the recruiting, transportation, training and smuggling of foreign fighters and suicide bombers into Iraq,” the military said.

A member of Iraq’s influential Committee of Muslim Scholars, Sheikh Mahmud Mehdi Al-Sumaidai, asked fellow Sunnis during Friday prayers to vote in December’s general elections, breaking with the group’s long-standing boycott of politics.

That way “we can preserve Iraq, its mosques and its scholars, (prevent) one community from grabbing power at the expense of another and unite to tell the forces of occupation: ‘Leave our country,’” he said in a sermon at the Um Al-Qura mosque.

It was not clear whether Sumaidai spoke for the committee, which has said it expects “nothing from the political process to solve the country’s main problem, which is its occupation.”