Gunmen and bombers killed 30 people in Baghdad yesterday, including 15 Shiite religious workers after a powerful Iraqi Shiite leader urged US President George W. Bush to strike harder at Sunni rebels.
Gunmen set off a car bomb to stop a minibus carrying Shiite government employees in Baghdad, then shot and killed 15 of them, the government said, while two car bombs killed 16 people and wounded 25 in a separate attack near a gasoline station in a religiously mixed area in southern Baghdad.
"It's clear that this crime is aimed at stoking sectarian strife among Iraqis. The terrorists are trying to portray these crimes as a sectarian conflict," said Salah Abdul Razzaq, a spokesman for the Shiite Endowment, a government foundation that oversees Shiite religious sites and mosques.
Razzaq said eight people were also wounded in the attack, which came a day after Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a cleric and head of the biggest party in Iraq's government, SCIRI, met Bush in Washington.
Hakim, former leader of his party's armed militia wing, denied accusations by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's once dominant Sunni minority that majority Shiites were stoking sectarian violence. He put the onus on Washington to take tougher action against insurgents.
"The strikes they are getting from the multinational forces are not hard enough to put an end to their acts," he said.
"Eliminating the danger of civil war in Iraq could only be achieved through directing decisive strikes against Baathist terrorists [and Islamist groups] in Iraq," he said in a speech after meeting Bush.
Bush said he and Hakim had discussed a need for Iraqi leaders to "reject the extremists that are trying to stop the advance of this young democracy."
A roadside bomb also exploded near an Iraqi army convoy in Yarmouk, a primarily Sunni area of west Baghdad, at 10am yesterday, killing two soldiers and wounding four, said an army captain who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Later today, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group -- headed by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton -- is to offer Bush more proposals on stabilizing Iraq and reducing the US presence. The group is expected to recommend gradually changing the mission of US troops in Iraq from combat to training and supporting Iraqi units.
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