Death Toll Up to 12 in Iraq Mosque Blast

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide car bomber attacked a Shiite mosque in the northern town of Tuz Khormato on Friday, killing at least 12 worshippers as they left midday prayers, police and hospital officials said.

The blast in the oil-rich Kirkuk region wounded more than 20 people and came two days after a string of bombings in Baghdad killed at least 160 people — the deadliest single day in the capital since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Al-Qaida in Iraq, the group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for Wednesday's carnage and declared what it called all-out war on Iraq's Shiite majority in retaliation for a joint U.S.-Iraqi offensive in the northern town of Tal Afar.

An Internet statement posted in the group's name late Thursday purportedly ordered attacks on Shiites, Iraqi security forces and their American backers "in every part of Iraq." The statement's authenticity could not be verified.

Friday's attacker drove toward the mosque as worshippers streamed out after prayers, police said. Guards opened fire before the car detonated near the entrance, collapsing part of the building's facade and hurling bodies into the street.

"We heard the shooting, then an explosion that shook the whole market," said a shopkeeper who helped carry the wounded to a clinic. "There were shoes and prayer beads everywhere."

The mosque serves the town's Shiite Turkmens, a community that has been targeted repeatedly by Sunni Arab insurgents. Tuz Khormato sits along a tense ethnic fault line between Turkmens, Arabs and Kurds.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, the capital remained edgy but quieter under heavy security. Residents swept up glass in the Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, where a bomb disguised as a van carrying day laborers killed 114 people Wednesday morning.

U.S. and Iraqi officials say the insurgency is trying to ignite a sectarian civil war ahead of the Oct. 15 referendum on a new constitution, which many Sunni Arabs fiercely oppose.

"The aim of the terrorists is clear: to stop Iraqis from voting and to turn neighbor against neighbor," a senior U.S. military spokesman said in Baghdad. "It will fail."

More than 190 people have been killed across Iraq since Wednesday in one of the bloodiest stretches of the insurgency.