[QUOTE]Baghdad was struck by a wave of co-ordinated bombings yesterday, killing 69 Shia Muslims as they left Friday prayers and marking a bloody blow for extremism in the chaotic wake of an election.
A car bomb and two other bombs in Sadr City, the vast Shia suburb of Baghdad, claimed 39 lives, and another two blasts struck the Chalabi mosque and a mosque in the Ameen district.
Al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Iraq were blamed for the attack by officials and local people in Sadr City. They are the likely culprits behind a series of large-scale, co-ordinated bombings on embassies, apartment buildings and restaurants since the March 7 elections.
Fears that the attacks could heighten sectarian tensions reawakened by the elections were strengthened by a statement from Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Sadrist political and religious movement. He called, via a representative, for mosques to be protected by the Mahdi Army, the militant wing of the movement. The Mahdi Army, responsible for massive bloodshed during the worst years of sectarian fighting, has formally been disbanded.
The party’s spokesman, Salah al-Obeidi, told The Times that the Sadrists would not be drawn into revenge attacks, saying, “[Al-Qaeda] want Iraq to go back to fighting ... but in the last year the Sadrists have done very good work [in politics].”
The attacks came only two days after the announcement by Nouri al-Maliki of the deaths of two senior al-Qaeda leaders. The Prime Minister is fighting for his political life after a close-run election on March 7.
The deaths were hailed by US and Iraqi commanders as a blow to the Sunni extremist group, but a recent sharp increase in violence — from about one large bombing every two months to one every week or two — has undermined such assurance.
the formation of a coalition in the new government is continuing with painful slowness, amid allegations of fraud from both sides.
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[URL="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article7106632.ece"]Source[/URL]