Sunni, Shi'ite clerics press for calm

BAGHDAD -- Clerics on both sides of Iraq's Sunni-Shi'ite divide scrambled to calm believers on the Muslim holy day yesterday amid ongoing violence that left at least 25 more people dead.

Eleven people were killed in a suicide bombing at a Shi'ite mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Tuz Khurmatu. Three laborers were gunned down while waiting for jobs in the capital and a Shi'ite cleric was assassinated in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. The US military said a Marine also had been killed Thursday in an explosion near Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

Sunni Arabs filled the ranks of Saddam Hussein's security and government apparatus. Mainly Sunni insurgents now are waging a guerrilla campaign against US-led forces, the country's interim government, and the ascendant Shi'ite majority.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who claims to lead Al Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq, has claimed responsibility for some of he worst violence. He declared war this week on Shi'ites in retaliation for a joint Iraqi and American offensive on the northern city of Tal Afar.

The declaration so shocked Iraqis that even the Muslim Scholars Association, an organization of hard-line Sunni clerics with alleged ties to the insurgency, demanded in a statement issued yesterday that Zarqawi ''retract these threats" because they hurt the Sunni Arab cause.

''It harms the image of jihad, obstructs the success of the resistance in Iraq, and leads to more innocent Iraqi bloodshed," said the statement. Iraq's Shi'ites have grown angry about violence directed at them. But in Najaf, prayer leader Sadr Din Qubanichi of the Imam Ali shrine, the most revered holy site in Iraq, asked followers to turn the other cheek.

''Submitting to one's passion and confusion will bring us to domestic sedition and eventually lead us to failure," Qubanichi, a disciple of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani told worshipers. ''We must go forward, be patient, and carry on building the new Iraq."

The suicide car bomb in Tuz Khurmatu, 150 miles north of Baghdad in an agricultural area populated by Kurds and Turkomen as well as Shi'ite and Sunni Arabs, exploded as worshipers began streaming out of the Rasoul Adham mosque. In addition to the dead, at least 20 people were injured.

Iraqi Army Captain Hussein Mahmoud said later that authorities arrested a man near the mosque ''from a neighboring country" with an explosives belt strapped to his waist. In the capital, Sheik Fadhil Lami, a preacher of the Ali Mosque in Sadr City, was gunned down as he drove his car to a gas station.

In Baghdad's ethnically and religiously mixed Jadida neighborhood, witnesses and police said masked gunmen in three cars opened fire on a group of mostly Shi'ite day-laborers, killing at least three and injuring 12. It was the second assault in less than a week on men waiting outside for jobs. On Wednesday, at least 112 laborers were killed in a car bomb attack in Baghdad.

''The driver was shouting, 'God is great! Shoot them!' " said Ali Salaam Salman, a security guard who witnessed yesterday's attack. But Iraqis who participate in the current Shi'ite-dominated government are also targets.

Gunmen assassinated the mayor of the Sunni Arab city of Qaim in western Anbar Province on Thursday after barging into his home and killing four of his guards, a police official said yesterday.

In Baghdad, a car bomb at a checkpoint killed three Iraqi police officers and gunmen killed two Ministry of Transportation employees, police said.