Fifteen worshipers were killed in an Iraqi mosque on Friday as a suicide bomber shot dead the prayer leader and then blew himself up in a town near the restive northern city of Mosul.
Two other attacks in Iraq on Friday killed a soldier and a Sunni tribal leader.
The suicide bomber targeted a Sunni Arab mosque in Tal Afar, a mostly Shiite Turkmen town in Nineveh Province between the city of Mosul and the Syrian border. It took place on the Muslim day of prayer.
“We now have 15 dead and 98 wounded, 20 of whom are in critical condition,” Hani Mohammed of Tal Afar Hospital said, adding that the dead ranged in age from 15 to 60.
Witnesses and security officials said that after the mosque’s imam began to speak, the attacker pulled out a gun and shot him, then set off a belt full of explosives as other worshipers tried to tackle him.
“As the imam took his place and began to speak, someone in a black jacket pulled out a gun and killed him, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is greatest],” said Mohammed Othman, who suffered chest and head injuries in the blast.
“When the people went after him, he blew himself up,” the man in his 40s said, speaking from Tal Afar hospital.
Salah Ahmed, a 49-year-old worker who was sitting outside the mosque when he heard the gunshots, said he ran to “try and see what was going on, but then the explosion happened. I woke up to find myself in the hospital.”
Imam Abdel Satar Hassan was a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni grouping that said it did not know why the attacker would have targeted Hassan.
“The imam was not threatening, this was just a move to create problems in the area. Their aim is to kill the largest possible number of people,” party spokesman Younis Hashim said in Baghdad.
Security services said another imam of the same mosque who apparently belonged to the same Sunni party was shot dead two years ago.
All roads leading to the mosque were closed by security officials after the attack, while new checkpoints were erected and stringent searches carried out, a police officer said.
In Badush, also in the Mosul area, a car bomb killed a soldier at an army checkpoint, police said.
In Diyala Province, unidentified gunmen shot dead Abbas Hatem, head of the al-Daini tribe, as he was leaving his house, provincial authorities said.
Nineveh Province has been hit by several major attacks against smaller towns as well as bombings in Mosul, Wardak, Sinjar and Khaznah in recent months that have killed more than 100 people.
Tal Afar was itself hit on July 9 by a double suicide attack targeting the home of a police sergeant and his brother, leaving 35 dead.
The Brussels-based think-tank International Crisis Group (ICG) said insurgent groups remained active in Nineveh, although violence in Iraq has generally declined compared with previous years since the 2003 US-led invasion.
In a report on Nineveh Province last month, the ICG said the province’s “continued strife risks dragging other parts of the country onto a downward slope.”
Violent deaths in Iraq dropped by more than half last month from the previous month, with 203 people killed. That was the lowest monthly toll since May.
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