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Cafes Are Shut Down in Iraqi City Where Bomb Killed 39 16 More Killed in Wave of Bombings in Iraq
(about 5 hours later)
BAGHDAD — The authorities in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Saturday ordered all cafes to be shut down, a day after 39 people were killed when a bomber detonated his explosives in a crowded coffee shop. BAGHDAD — A bomb exploded outside a Sunni mosque in Baghdad late Saturday, killing at least 13 people who were leaving prayers and extending a daily wave of violence rippling across Iraq since the holy month of Ramadan began.
The Kirkuk police chief, Maj. Gen. Jamal Tahir, said Saturday that his troops could not secure dozens of teahouses and coffee shops scattered across the city. Kirkuk is 180 miles north of Baghdad. A separate attack at a funeral northeast of Baghdad killed three people, and the death toll in a bombing in the northern city of Kirkuk on Friday rose to 39.
General Tahir said he had not yet decided when the coffee shops would be able to open again. The Baghdad blast went off around 10 p.m. near the gate of the Khalid bin al-Walid mosque in the southern Dora neighborhood, a largely Sunni Muslim area, the police said. It struck just after special late-evening prayers held during Ramadan had ended.
Iraq is being rocked by its deadliest and most sustained wave of bloodshed in half a decade. More than 2,600 people have been killed since April. At least 35 people were wounded in addition to those killed, according to the police and a hospital official.
The late-night blast in Kirkuk ripped through the Classico Cafe as patrons were enjoying tea and water pipes hours after the sunset meal that breaks the daylong Ramadan fast, police officials said. There has been no claim of responsibility for the attack, which also wounded 26 people, the police said. Iraq is weathering its worst eruption of violence in half a decade, raising fears that the country is heading back toward the widespread sectarian fighting that peaked in 2006 and 2007. More than 2,600 people have been killed since the start of April.
Hours before the attack, a Sunni cleric, Salah al-Nuaimi, urged calm among Iraqis during a joint Sunni-Shiite sermon in Baghdad. The pace of the bloodshed has picked up since Ramadan began Wednesday, including a suicide bombing at a coffee shop in Kirkuk late Friday.
“Enough is enough,” Mr. Nuaimi said. “We all love Iraq, we are all Iraqis and we want to be united. We want to stop the bloodletting, and develop and build Iraq.” In the other attack on Saturday, a suicide bomber wounded 10 in addition to killing three at a funeral in the town of Abbara, near the city of Baquba, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, the police and hospital officials said.
All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information to journalists.
There was no claim of responsibility for the recent wave of attacks.
Sunni extremists, including the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, frequently target Shiites, security forces and civil servants in an effort to undermine the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
The bombing at the Sunni mosque could have been the work of Shiite militias, which have kept a low profile in recent years, or Sunni militants hoping to set off a sectarian backlash against Shiites.
Attacks on Sunni places of worship have spiked in recent months as security has deteriorated and sectarian tensions have grown.
Members of Iraq’s Sunni minority have been protesting for months against the Shiite-led government, alleging they receive second-class treatment. Sunni militant groups have tried to tap into that anger by linking their cause to that of the demonstrators.
Earlier Saturday, the authorities in Kirkuk ordered all cafes in the city to be temporarily shut down a day after a suicide attack there.
The Kirkuk police chief, Maj. Gen. Jamal Tahir, said his officers could not guarantee the security of patrons at the dozens of teahouses and coffee shops scattered across the city. It was unclear when the shops would be allowed to reopen.
Kirkuk is a hotbed for ethnic tensions, with its Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen holding competing claims to the oil-rich area. The Kurds want to incorporate it into their self-ruled region in Iraq’s north, but Arabs and Turkmen are opposed.