Bombers target Iraqi officials
At least 12 people die in two separate suicide attacks north of Baghdad.
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“Iraq is still under foreign occupation and Iraqis continue to die in great numbers” albaghawy, Luxembourg |
Atallah escaped the attack but five people, including one of his bodyguards, were killed. The identities of the other casualties were not immediately known.
US forces had been deployed in the area after the blasts, al-Bijwari said.
The attacks come a day after a suicide bomber killed 14 people at a police post near Samarra, around 100 km south of Baiji, also in Salaheddin province.
Car and roadside bombs on Monday killed at least 21 people across Iraq. Al-Qaeda had threatened to increase attacks during the month of Ramadan.
Fighting al-Qaeda
Last Thursday, a roadside bomb near Samarra killed Sheikh Maawia Naji Jebara, the leader of the Salaheddin Awakening Council.
An umbrella organisation of Iraqi armed groups, including al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the killing in a statement posted on the internet.
“Your brothers … have succeeded in tracking and assassinating the leader of infidelity and apostasy who is known as Maawia Jebara,” the so-called Islamic State of Iraq said.
Sheikh Sabah Mutashar al-Shimmary,the deputy leader of the council, was wounded in the attack on Jebara’s convoy. He recently said that his group was making headway against al-Qaeda fighters.
“Our forces are working in co-ordination with the ministers of defence and interior and have conducted more than 100 combat duties against al-Qaeda,” Shimmary said.
“We arrested some Arab terrorists including one Saudi … our troops consist of 3,000 fighters distributed across seven headquarters in the province.”
The US military has said that tribal police units have sprung up in a number of provinces to target al-Qaeda fighters, spreading a model first used in al-Anbar province, but they have also become targets for suicide bombers.
Salaheddin province has a predominantly Sunni population. In February 2006, an attack on a Shia shrine in Samarra unleashed sectarian killings across the country.
‘Occupying enemy’
Meanwhile, a leading Iraqi Sunni cleric has urged Iraqis not to join US forces in fighting al-Qaeda, arguing that by doing so they are siding with the “enemy”.
| “We reject their ideas but al-Qaeda remains part of us and we are part of it. Ninety per cent of al-Qaeda members are now Iraqis” Harith al-Dhari, head of the Muslim Scholars’ Association |
“A decision to stand beside the occupying enemy in order to achieve a wish to stay in Iraq under the pretext of destroying al-Qaeda is neither accepted legally nor on patriotic or rational grounds,” Harith al-Dhari, head of the Muslim Scholars’ Association, said.
“We do not accept the acts of al-Qaeda,” Dhari said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Tuesday.
“We reject their ideas but al-Qaeda remains part of us and we are part of it. Ninety per cent of al-Qaeda members are now Iraqis,” he said.
“We can talk to them. We can reform them and God may bless them to resort to wisdom.”
Dhari is currently living in exile in the Jordanian capital, Amman.