Iraqi Shiite cleric says recent attacks are "wake-up call" (Roundup)

Jul 17, 2009, 12:55 GMT

Baghdad - A Shiite Iraqi cleric said Friday that a spate of recent sectarian attacks in Iraq were a 'wake-up call' to the government.

'These blasts are a wake-up call for the Iraqi government and all the political parties that there is a scheme aiming to drag the country back to strife and internal fighting,' Sheikh Abdel Mahdi al-Karbalai said during the Friday prayers in Karbala, southwest of Baghdad.

Al-Karbalai, a confidant of Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said that recent attacks targeted Christian places of worship, the Shiite-dominated al-Sadr city, Mosul city or Kirkuk, while other attacks targeted innocent men, women and children.

On Sunday, an attack on a church in eastern Baghdad left four dead and 18 injured and the director of Kirkuk's Department of Financial Control, Aziz Rozko Hanna, a Christian, was assassinated when gunmen pulled him from his car and shot him dead.

Moreover, dozens of Iraqis were killed last week due to a series of lethal attacks near Mosul, which is among the most ethnically and religiously diverse areas of Iraq.

'We need to be more cautious and to understand the reality of this scheme. Government officials, politicians and citizens should be aware of this plot, so that they would not be drawn down to what the enemies want,' added al-Karbalai.

On Friday, two children were killed and 11 others injured, all members of the same family, when their house in the western city of Falluja was blown up by two bombs, police sources said.

'A police officer's house was detonated, leaving two children dead and 11 people, including women and children, injured,' sources told the German Press Agency dpa, adding that they suspect that al-Qaeda was behind the attack.

Falluja, some 60 kilometres west of Baghdad, is in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland. Following the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, it was the site of some of the worst fighting between US forces and Sunni insurgents.

At least three soldiers from the US-led coalition forces in Iraq were killed in attack on their base in the southern city of Basra, US military officials said Friday.

The Multinational Force in Iraq said on its website that the deaths were caused by 'indirect fire,' occurring on Thursday evening, and that the exact circumstances of the attack were being investigated.