6 Killed, 29 Injured in Car Bombing Outside Shiite Mosque in Baghdad

A car bomb exploded in southwestern Baghdad today outside a mosque where Shiites were celebrating the Eid al-Adha holiday, killing at least six people and wounding at least 29, Iraqi police said.

An Interior Ministry source said the toll was expected to rise. The explosion outside the al-Taf mosque was the second attack on a Shiite mosque in Baghdad this week. No one was hurt in the earlier blast.

Attacks on Shiites have increased in the run-up to scheduled Jan. 30 national elections. Shiites strongly support the vote, but some members of the Sunni minority have called for a boycott, and Sunni militants have vowed to disrupt the voting.

In earlier violence today, a 1st Infantry Division soldier was killed by guerrillas and a second was wounded during raids on suspected insurgent hide-outs near the town of Duluiya, about 50 miles north of the capital, the U.S. military announced.

One suspected insurgent was killed and 12 others were detained in raids on eight locations, the military statement said.

More than 1,360 U.S. service members have been killed since the war began in March 2003.

On Thursday, U.S. troops launched raids around the northern city of Mosul, seizing weapons and arresting suspects in an attempt to prevent disruption of the elections.

Soldiers from the Stryker Brigade Combat Team detained nine people, and in the last two weeks, 200 suspected insurgents have been rounded up there, the U.S. military said.

In southern Iraq, an explosion wounded five British soldiers and several Iraqi civilians, the British military said.

That attack came on the heels of the publication of photos apparently showing abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British troops.

The blast was at an entrance to the Shaibah logistics base about six miles west of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city.

An Internet posting said a militant group led by Palestinian-Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi was behind what it called a suicide attack to avenge abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

North of Baghdad, three Iraqi army soldiers were killed Thursday by a roadside bomb in the city of Samarra, a U.S. military spokesman said.