Sunni-Shi’ite Jihad Update from AFP, with thanks to JE:
A series of tit-for-tat attacks on Shiite and Sunni mosques has killed at least 17 people in Iraq on the Muslim day of prayer, triggering fears of a new upsurge in sectarian violence.
At least 30 people were also killed or wounded in deadly clashes in Baghdad’s Shiite slum district of Sadr City between Shiite militiamen and US-Iraqi forces who claimed to have captured a leading insurgent there.
Fears of sectarian bloodshed rose again as at least five mosques were attacked across the country – three of them Sunni – the day after a car bomb exploded next to a Shiite shrine in Kufa, south of Baghdad, that killed 12 Shiites, most of them Iranian pilgrims.
Imam ‘killed’: claims
Sunni MP Adnan al-Dulaimi’s party claimed that a police commando force and sectarian militias had kidnapped and killed Sheikh Said Mohammed Taha al-Samarrai, imam of a mosque in the town of Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.
Sheikh Abdel Ghafur al-Sammarai, the head of the Sunni religious endowment authority, also said in his Friday sermon that another imam of a Baghdad mosque, Sheikh Alaa Mohammed Abbas al-Rikabi, had been kidnapped.