15 Dead In Shiite Mosque Bombing

15 Dead in Shiite Mosque Bombing
Diwaniyah Street Fighting

This wire service says that some 40 died in guerrilla violence in Iraq these past few days.

Reuters reports civil war violence on Friday:

A suicide bomber in Baghdad struck a Shiite mosque, killing at least 15 and wounding 25. This is very bad, given the high sectarian tensions in the capital. It is the Buratha Mosque of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has been hit before. Some reports say he used a shoe bomb, but this confuses me since he seems to have been inside the mosque when it detonated, and you don’t use shoes inside the mosque.

Guerrillas fired mortar rounds at a north Baghdad neighborhood, killing 3 persons and wounding 16.

Southwest of Yusufiyah near Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a US military checkpoint, killing one GI and perhaps as many as 3 (two are missing).

In the southern port city of Basra, roiled by sectarian violence visited on minority Sunnis by the majority Shiites (and sometime vice versa), guerrillas shot Shaikh Yusuf al-Hasan, a Sunni religious leader, down dead near the mosque where he led prayers.

US military criminal investigators are looking into the deaths of three Iraqis in US military custory in May.

Al-Zaman and AFP say that US and Iraqi military forces staged an assault Friday on the Euphrates Military District of the city of Diwaniyah, south Iraq. Some were parachuted in. The troops engaged in street battles with Iraqi guerrillas in the quarter.

The attack came after Multinational Forces and Iraqi police raided the house of Shaikh Muhammad al-Umrani, the preacher and prayer leader at the large al-Dagharah mosque. Al-Umrani was not arrested. The raid provoked the firing at the local multinational forces base of Katyusha rockets, which eyewitnesses said caused substantial property damage and may have led to casualties.