Dozens of Shiite villagers in the north were massacred by Sunni extremists, two officials said yesterday, while a car bomb exploded across the street from the Iranian embassy in the heart of Baghdad and killed four civilians.
Also yesterday, Shiite legislators loyal to anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr decided to end their five-week boycott of parliament, one of their leaders said. The Shiite protest along with a separate Sunni boycott had blocked work on key benchmark legislation demanded by the US
Police Colonel Ragheb Radhi al-Omairi said 29 members of a Shiite tribe were massacred overnight in Diyala Province when dozens of suspected Sunni gunmen raided their village near Muqdadiyah, about 95km northeast of Baghdad. The dead included four women, al-Omairi said.
Al-Omairi said he had not seen the bodies and it was unclear whether they had been retrieved.
An Iraqi army officer said the attack occurred in the village of Diwailiya and that at least 10 bodies were mutilated in the hour-long raid.
In Baghdad, the blast near the Iranian Embassy occurred in late morning a few hundred yards north of the US-controlled Green Zone, sending a huge cloud of black smoke over the city. Three civilians also were wounded, said police.
Also yesterday, the bodies of two security guards were found in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour, two days after they were kidnapped from the office of a cellphone company where they worked, police said.
The leader of the 30-member Sadrist bloc in parliament, Nasser al-Rubaie, said the decision to end the boycott was taken after the government agreed to rebuild a Shiite mosque in Samarra which was destroyed in two bombings and to secure the highway from Baghdad and the shrine.
Pressure is now expected to mount on the Sunnis to end their boycott, which began over the ouster of the Sunni speaker of parliament last month. Sunni leaders say an agreement is near on ending the protest.
Both protests have paralyzed work in Iraq's fractious, 275-member assembly.
In Kirkuk, families collected the bodies of relatives from hospitals a day after a triple bombing killed about 80 people and wounded more than 150. Others were searching debris still left on the street, hoping for clues about what happened to friends and relatives whose bodies have not been identified.
All but one of the victims died when a huge truck bomb exploded near the Kirkuk Castle and the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
It was the deadliest attack in Kirkuk, where Arabs, Turkomen and Kurds are competing for control of the city at the heart of Iraq's northern oil region.
Voters in the city are to decide whether to join the Kurdish self-ruled region in a referendum by year's end.
With three ethnic groups competing for control, violence in Kirkuk has been frequent. But Monday's blasts were on a far bigger scale than most attacks.
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