Baghdad, Iraq - A suicide bomber detonated a belt of explosives at a gathering of Sufi Muslims north of Baghdad, killing at least 10 people and wounding at least 11 others, an Interior Ministry official said Friday.
The attack, which occurred Thursday evening, capped an extremely bloody day across the country, in which at least 44 Iraqis, including a Shiite cleric, were killed. More violence followed Friday, as at least three Iraqis were killed and a dozen wounded in shootings and bombings. A U.S. military spokesman also said a soldier was killed Tuesday in a rocket attack at a U.S. base in Baghdad.
At Friday prayers, a cleric representing one of the governing Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, called for the government to execute Saddam Hussein and his aides as soon as possible. The cleric's demand followed a CNN interview Tuesday with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, in which he said Hussein could be tried within two months.
The cleric, Sheik Muhammad Taki al-Mowla, asked his followers to take to the streets to demand Hussein's execution, which he said would help deflate the insurgency, led largely by Sunni Arabs like Hussein.
"We have to stage peaceful demonstrations and tell the government that we want Saddam and his followers executed as soon as possible," Sheik Mowla said to hundreds of Shiite worshipers at the Baratha mosque in Baghdad. "Some people still believe that Saddam will return, but his execution will kill their hopes."
The sheik also acknowledged that sectarian violence was on the rise, and that "a man is killed nowadays according to his identity, and they place explosives in his body after they kill him, and they put him in front of his house."
Cleric denounces `division'
As he spoke, members of the Badr Organization, the militia formed in the 1980s by the sheik's party, stood among the worshipers and brandished Kalashnikovs and pistols. "We have co-existed with the Sunnis for hundreds of years," the sheik said, "and we do not want sectarian division, and we denounce it."
The suicide bombing and the killing of the Shiite cleric Thursday evening were the two latest incidents of sectarian bloodshed and pointed to the growing rifts in Iraqi society.
In the bombing, the attacker walked into a headquarters of the Kasnazani sect of Sufism, a mystical branch of Sunni Islam, during the start of a religious ceremony, the Interior Ministry official said. The building is near the town of Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, and is the site of a twice-weekly gathering for the religious ceremony.
It was unclear who carried out the attack, but adherents of the conservative Salafi sect, another branch of Sunni Islam, have killed Sufis for centuries and desecrated their tombs, denouncing them as infidels. Prominent Salafi fighters include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant, and Osama bin Laden.
More than an hour later, Sheik Ali Abdul-Hussein, 53, a prominent Shiite cleric in the southern city of Basra, was shot dead after he left his mosque to go home with his son. Two men wearing black and driving a Toyota shot the sheik three times in the head and chest, his son, Falah Abdul-Kareem, said in an interview.