At least 20 killed in Iraq holiday violence (Roundup)

Dec 24, 2009, 15:44 GMT

Baghdad - At least 20 people were killed Thursday in a wave of attacks across Iraq ahead of important Christian and Shiite Muslim holidays, police said.

In the central Iraqi town of Hilla, twin car bombs killed at least 15 people, including Naama al-Bakri, a local council member and a senior member of the ruling Dawaa Party, and injured at least 75 others, police told the German Press Agency dpa.

It was the bloodiest in a wave of attacks targeting Iraqi Shiite Muslims at the start of the Muharram holiday, as pilgrims marched toward the southern city of Karbala to mark the death in battle of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson, Hussein, in the year 680.

A series of blasts targeted pilgrims in Baghdad as they departed for Karbala on Wednesday, killing at least four people and injuring dozens more. A bomb at a Karbala eatery the same day wounded nine people, police told Baghdad's Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a Christian man was shot dead on Thursday afternoon, police there told dpa. A second man, whose faith police did not specify, was also fatally shot in the city, they added.

The attack followed a bombing near two churches in the city that killed two people and injured five others the previous day.

Leaders from Mosul's ancient Christian community say parishioners have been subject to increased violence, threats and intimidation they believe is intended to chase them from the region ahead of the 2010 parliamentary elections.

'Christians remain a target for armed groups especially in Mosul, where many people and churches have been targeted. This worries us immensely,' Pascale Warda, former Iraqi Minister of Immigration and Refugees, and an Iraqi Christian, told dpa.

Community leaders say some 250,000 Iraqi Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in 2003, almost a quarter of Iraq's Christian population before the US-led invasion.

Mosul Christian leaders say thousands have fled from the region around Mosul, one of Iraq's most religiously and ethnically diverse but also among its most violent, in recent years.

In the similarly diverse and tense northern city of Kirkuk, the Chaldean Catholic Church canceled Christmas Mass, the archdiocese announced Wednesday.

Two members of a Sunni, government-allied militia were fatally shot while manning a checkpoint in the city on Thursday, police there said.

Iraqi and US officials credit such Sahwa, or 'awakening' militias with helping to restore a measure of calm in the regions they patrol. Their members regularly come under attack from insurgents, who regard them and others who work with the government as collaborators.

Gunmen also fatally shot an employee of the city's electrical department as he went about his work on Thursday, police told Aswat al-Iraq.