Attack on Iranian Pilgrims Kills 6, Injures 31

More Sunni and Shi'ite strife in Iraq. From Bloomberg: Six Iranians were killed and 31 were injured in a shooting in Iraq, where they planned to visit Shiite Muslim shrines, Iran’s state-run Mehr news agency said.

The attack, killing five women and a man, took place late yesterday near Khanaqin, an Iraqi town northeast of Baghdad, on a route to the capital from the border with Iran, an official from Iran’s pilgrimage organization told state-run Fars news. The pilgrims probably were from the Iranian city of Mashhad, he said. The bodies of the dead will be handed over to Iran today, a local governor told Mehr. The wounded will also return today.

The Iranians were traveling together, though they weren’t on an organized tour, Mehr cited Gholamreza Rezaian, head of Iran’s Immigration and Foreign Nationals Police, as saying. Independent trips to Iraq by Iranian pilgrims will be banned and they must travel there under the supervision of the pilgrimage organization, Rezaian said.

Shiite pilgrims in Iraq have been targeted by Sunni Muslim insurgents in attacks that Iraqi government officials say are aimed at stoking sectarian violence. Iranians have been traveling to Iraq in greater numbers to visit Shiite religious sites since the fall of President Saddam Hussein and his Sunni- led regime in 2003.

On April 23, as many as 47 people were killed and 69 wounded by a suicide bomber at a roadside restaurant near Baqubah, north of Baghdad, where a group of Iranian pilgrims had stopped to eat, the U.S.-led coalition said at the time.