BAGHDAD, 15 May 2006 — A string of deadly attacks ripped through the Iraqi capital yesterday, killing at least 26 people and wounding nearly 70, police said. Six small Shiite shrines also were damaged in a series of blasts around Baquba, a mixed Sunni Arab-Shiite region where sectarian tensions are running high.
Elsewhere in Iraq, 15 people died in other attacks, including two British soldiers who were killed in a roadside bomb attack in southern Iraq on Saturday night.
Baghdad’s deadliest attack yesterday involved two suicide car bombs that exploded near a main checkpoint on a four-lane road leading to Baghdad’s international airport, killing at least 14 Iraqis and wounding six. The other 12 Iraqis were killed by four roadside bombs, three targeting Iraqi police patrols and one that exploded in an open market.
The surge of violence occurred as Iraq’s Parliament met in Baghdad, and Prime Minister-designate Nuri Al-Maliki met privately with politicians in an effort to form a Cabinet for a new national unity government — one the Americans hope can help reduce sectarian violence and one day make it possible for US forces to withdraw from Iraq.
His effort was set back when a member of an influential Shiite alliance bloc threatened to unilaterally form a new government, if rival groups did not scale back their demands for Cabinet posts. At the same time, Sunni Arabs threatened to withdraw entirely from the political process.
Maliki faces a May 22 constitutional deadline to form the Cabinet.
The attacks on the Shiite shrines near Baquba began about 7.15 a.m. Saturday when one or more bombs exploded inside the Tameem shrine, according to US military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson. Other attacks occurred throughout the day at five other shrines east of Baquba, capital of the religiously mixed Diyala province 55 km northeast of Baghdad and one of the flash points of sectarian tensions.
“These are terrorist attacks meant to divide Iraq’s Shiites and Sunni Arabs, but God willing, they will not succeed,” said Mohammed Hussein, 45, a businessman in Baquba.
The shrine attacks could have significant repercussions _ particularly in the Baquba area, a mixed Sunni Arab-Shiite region where sectarian tensions are running high.
On Feb. 22, bombs heavily damaged the Golden Dome in Samarra. That attack triggered a wave of reprisals against Sunnis, dramatically escalating sectarian tension and pushing the country to the brink of civil war.
“Such acts anger God and hurt the feeling of all honest Iraqis,” Shiite cleric Adnan Al-Rubaie said in Baquba yesterday. “The goal is clear — to ignite a civil strife. God’s curse on everybody who tries to create sedition in this country,” he said in a telephone interview.
Elsewhere, at 11.45 p.m. Saturday, a roadside bomb killed two British soldiers as they patrolled in their armored vehicle near the southern Iraqi city of Basra, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said. A third soldier was wounded.
