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Bombing kills 37 Shiites preparing for holy month

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published September 24, 2006

BAGHDAD - A bomb claimed by a Sunni Arab extremist group killed at least 37 Shiites in Baghdad on Saturday as they stocked up on fuel for Ramadan, just days after the U.S. military warned that sectarian bloodshed could worsen during the Islamic holy month.

The group said it carried out the bombing to avenge a Friday attack by a suspected Shiite death squad on Sunni Arab homes and mosques that killed four people in a mixed Baghdad neighborhood.

Iraq's armed forces said they struck a blow against groups affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq, announcing the arrest of a senior leader of Ansar al-Sunnah, a radical Sunni group responsible for attacks on U.S. forces, kidnappings and beheadings.

Muntasir Hamoud Ileiwi al-Jubouri and two aides were captured late Friday near Muqdadiyah, 56 miles northeast of Baghdad, said Brig. Qassim al-Mussawi, spokesman for the General Command of the Armed Forces.

A U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in northern Baghdad, and two other American soldiers were killed and three injured when a bomb exploded near their patrol outside Hawija, 150 miles north of the capital, the U.S. command said.

A Danish soldier was also reported killed and eight wounded in a roadside bombing in southern Iraq. He was the fourth Danish soldier to die in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein's regime more than three years ago.

The Sunni extremist group Jamaat Jund al-Sahaba, or Soldiers of the Prophet's Companions, claimed responsibility for the bomb attack on Shiites in Sadr City, a sprawling slum that is home to more than 2-million people and a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Police said the bomb went off as people crowded behind a kerosene truck to buy fuel for Ramadan, during which people gather just after sunset for a communal meal to break a daylong abstention from food and water.

Jamaat Jund al-Sahaba blamed Sadr's Mahdi Army militia for the Friday attack that killed four people in the Hurryah neighborhood, where a Shiite militia last week openly threatened members of the Sunni minority. The authenticity of the statement could not be independently verified.

The killings came on the first day of Ramadan for Sunni Arabs. Shiites, along with the Shiite-led Iraqi government, were expected to declare today as the first day of the holy month, a tangible sign of the differences separating the two Islamic sects.

In other violence, eight bodies dumped in the Tigris River, the apparent victims of sectarian death squads, were turned in at the morgue in Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.

One person was killed and six civilians were injured in Saturday evening in a northern Baghdad district when a motorcycle rigged with a bomb exploded, police said.

In the northern city of Baiji, gunmen threw the decapitated heads of 10 Iraqi army soldiers into a popular open-air market, police said.

[Last modified September 24, 2006, 01:37:22]