Iraq's Diyala province hit by another suicide attack
BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber killed at least eight people today outside a Shiite mosque in Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, leaving at least eight people dead and 14 wounded in the run-up to the sect's major religious holiday, police said.
The attacker blew himself up at 5:45 p.m. as worshipers were making preparations for the festival of Ashura, which falls on Saturday, police said. The blast came a day after a female suicide bomber struck in the nearby town of Khan Bani Saad, killing eight people.
On Ashura, the 10th day of Muharram, the first month in the Muslim calendar, Shiites mourn the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Hussein and his followers were slaughtered in 680 on the plains of Karbala by the Islamic ruler Yazid, a Sunni. His martyrdom and the death of his father, Ali, before him is the root of the schism between Sunni and Shiite Islam.
The celebrations for Ashura, in which tens of thousands flock to Karbala to mourn Hussein's death and reenact his last battle, have become symbolic of the ascendancy of Iraq's Shiite majority, who were restricted in celebrating their faith under the late dictator Saddam Hussein.
Sunni extremists have targeted the Ashura celebrations since the fall of the old regime. In 2004, suicide bombers killed nearly 180 people in multiple attacks in Karbala and at a Shiite shrine in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad.
Diyala province, north and east of Baghdad, with its mixed Sunni-Shiite population, has been a magnet for sectarian violence. Many Sunni militants who fled Baghdad in the face of a U.S. military crackdown last year are believed to have taken refuge there. The province last week saw a massive American-led offensive launched to drive militants out of their sanctuaries north of Baqubah.
ned.parker@latimes.com
Times staff writers Caesar Ahmed and Saif Hameed contributed to this report.
