BAGHDAD, April 8: A suicide car bomber killed six pilgrims on Saturday as Iraq battled to thwart a fresh outbreak of sectarian bloodshed that killed 79 worshippers near a mosque a day earlier. The car bomber also wounded 21 people when he blew himself up on a road near the town of Mussayib, 55km south of Baghdad and home to a number of shrines, police said.
But amid fears of widespread reprisals, powerful Shia leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim called upon the country’s once elite Sunni Arabs to help ‘unify’ Iraq.
“The Sunni brothers are our political partners and we need to co-exist with them and form a government as soon as possible,” Mr Hakim said in an address to thousands of his followers who had gathered at his office in central Baghdad.
Mr Hakim heads the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the key party in the United Iraqi Alliance, the largest political bloc in the country.
“The aim of these attacks is to stop the political process and create an impasse,” he said. “But let me tell all that these attacks can’t stop us from walking the political path.”
He accused groups loyal to the former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda’s frontman in Iraq, over the bombings.
Meanwhile, grief-stricken relatives collected their loved ones’ bodies from hospitals and headed to the southern holy city of Najaf for their burials.
Fearing reprisals similar to those after the February 22 bombing of a Samarra shrine, Iraqi and US authorities were on high alert.
Sunni political and religious associations also condemned Friday’s blast, which came two days before Sunday’s third anniversary of fall of the Saddam’s regime.
The political leadership has been deadlocked over the formation of a national unity government as Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has rejected pressure from opponents and some in his own Shia party to step down.
In further violence, the US military announced on Saturday the death of one marine who was allegedly shot on Thursday by an Iraqi soldier.
The latest fatality takes the US military toll in Iraq since the invasion to 2,348, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
Police said gunmen killed four people in and around the restive city of Baquba, of which two were flour mill workers.
Police also found 11 bullet-riddled, tortured bodies across Iraq.
And in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, an Iraq interpreter working for US forces was kidnapped.
Meanwhile, Iraq announced the discovery of crude oil reserves in Kurdistan’s Zakho region, close to the border with Turkey.
