Attacks Kill 24 at Shiite Sites

BAGHDAD — Gunmen fired into a bakery complex bedecked with Shiite Muslim political posters here Friday while another group of militants car-bombed a Shiite mosque near Baqubah, killing more than 20 people in the two attacks.

The deaths raised fears that Sunni Muslim insurgents are increasingly targeting the Shiite community, which is preparing for an important holiday.

Blood was spattered amid the bread and cookies of the bakery, which was draped with religious mottos and decorated with pictures of clerics, including Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Some Shiites saw the two attacks as a sign of a renewed assault on their sect. The U.S. government is trying to control sectarian violence to keep the country from plunging into a full-fledged civil war.

“They are definitely the Wahhabi fundamentalists who consider Shiite traditions as being blasphemous,” said Ali Radhi, a 21-year-old police officer, referring to the dominant sect of Islam in Saudi Arabia. “These were just innocent workers.”

A brother of one of the dead men wept as he was led from the scene of the shootings to a car. He blamed politics for his sibling’s death.

“May Allah curse both Sunni and Shiite parties, who have caused such misery,” the distraught man said, surrounded by friends and family members.

The divide between Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq has become more pronounced in the wake of the Jan. 30 elections, which Shiite blocs are expected to win when final results are made public in the coming days. Shiites make up about 60% of Iraq’s population.

For the first time in modern Iraq’s history, Sunnis, who largely boycotted the vote, are expected to have a minority role in the government. Embittered and threatened, Sunni groups are divided over whether to fight the Shiite ascendancy or participate in the drafting of a new constitution for the country, an exercise that will follow the selection of a president and prime minister.

At Baghdad’s main Sunni mosque, one prayer leader proposed Friday that Sunni leaders meet soon to decide on a Sunni stance toward the government that will be formed after election results are made public.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, made a lightning visit to Iraq, meeting with interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whose party failed to gain a large share of the vote, according to partial results. Allawi’s role in the next government is unclear.

On his eighth visit since the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Rumsfeld chatted with injured U.S. soldiers and reviewed the training of Iraqi security forces, considered key to U.S. plans to reduce American troop levels in Iraq. The Defense secretary flew from violence-torn Mosul in the north to Baghdad to an Iraqi military base in nearby Taji, where the Iraqi army has begun building a tank brigade.

“There’s no question progress has been made,” Rumsfeld said. “The professionalism of these units is advancing.

“Once they have that confidence, that capacity and capability, our forces, coalition forces, will be able to go home,” Rumsfeld told U.S. troops in Mosul. “And go home with the honor you will have earned.”

The attack at the bakery complex took place at 8:15 a.m., when about a dozen men wearing ski masks jumped out of three cars and began firing into two businesses, both owned by Shiites.

The men riddled the area with gunfire, killing 11 people, including eight workers, and leaving behind blood-covered floors, shell casings and grieving relatives.

Neighbors in the poor, largely Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad blamed the killings on Wahhabi Sunnis who they said had been offended by the prominent posters of Shiite religious and political figures.

The car bomb exploded outside a Shiite mosque just as Friday prayers were ending in Balad Ruz, a town northeast of Baghdad in an area with Shiite and Sunni villages.

Residents called authorities after becoming suspicious of a truck loaded with maize parked outside the mosque. The truck exploded just as a contingent of Iraqi national guard troops arrived to inspect the vehicle.

A police spokesman said the blast had killed nine civilians and four guardsmen, and wounded 23 civilians and four guardsmen.

Worshippers were preparing to start on a pilgrimage for Ashura, the holiday in which Shiites recall the death of Hussein, the revered grandson of the prophet Muhammad. Last year, the worst bloodshed since the toppling of Saddam Hussein occurred during Ashura as suicide bombers attacked throngs of Shiite pilgrims, causing a death toll in Baghdad and Karbala that approached 200.

In another incident with religious overtones, more details emerged about a battle with insurgents Thursday in Salman Pak that left at least 14 police officers dead and 65 wounded. Four insurgents were killed, according to the Interior Ministry. Footage on Arab television stations showed cars burning and bodies lying in the street.

One witness said the insurgents attacked after police officers began taunting Sunnis over loudspeakers during a search for weapons in the town 15 miles southeast of Baghdad.

The police, some of whom apparently were Shiites, “started calling the people Sunni cowards in addition to all kinds of names,” said Mohammed Abdul Khaliq Shummari, a local resident and journalist.

“I was initially hopeful when I first saw the police entering the town, and so did many of the people,” Shummari said. “But then all hell broke loose when they started broadcasting ... with their loudspeakers.”

Insurgents briefly took over a police station, and U.S. forces were called in to support the police with helicopter strikes and help evacuate the wounded.

Vote counting proceeded slowly Friday, with officials emphasizing that results must be accurate to allay public doubt. A new set of partial returns involving voting for 12 of Iraq’s 18 provincial councils underscored a pattern of reduced turnout by Sunnis.

In Dohuk, a mainly Kurdish town in the north and the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in the south, the voting turnout for provincial councils was 89%, 83% and 73% of registered voters, respectively. The Kurds, an ethnic group, are mostly Sunni but were oppressed under Hussein’s regime.

But in two provinces with larger Sunni Arab populations, Baghdad and Diyala, the turnout was 47% and 34%, according to figures that an election official released at a news conference. Overall turnout data for the national assembly election are still unavailable, the official said.

A Western official who briefed reporters here said that some Sunni sheiks already were expressing regret that they had not participated in greater numbers, and some had contacted authorities asking whether the election could be restaged in their areas -- a request that could not granted under current Iraqi law.

Divisions among Sunnis were in evidence after prayer leader Sheik Ahmad Abdul-Ghafoor Samarrai revealed plans to organize a broad conference of the Sunni community, saying it would be best for the Sunnis to work with the other segments of Iraqi society “to reach the best formulas of action that serve the nation” and “to put an end to the foreign occupation of our country.”

But the call was immediately rejected by a leader of the Muslim Scholars Assn., an influential hard-line Sunni group.

“We do not accept that any conference should be organized and held in the name of the Sunnis, nor in the name of the Shiites, nor in the name of the Kurds!” Abdel Salam Kubaisi said in a telephone interview with The Times.

“We would only participate in a conference held in the name of Iraq, and the people of Iraq with the whole spectrum of sects, religions and nationalities,” he said, accusing the United States of trying to divide the country into religious and ethnic groups.

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Special correspondents Faris Al-Mehdawi in Baqubah and Suhail Affan in Baghdad contributed to this report.