A bomb planted between a Sunni mosque and a youth center went off during Friday prayers, killing four people and wounding another nine, police said. In other violence, gunmen in Tikrit killed two civilians who were employed by U.S. army, while a U.S. Marine was killed in action in western Iraq, officials said.
The Baghdad explosion hit just as worshippers started leaving the al-Ali al-Aadhim mosque in a southeastern neighborhood, said police Capt. Ali Mahdi.
According to the AP, the Marine was assigned to Regimental Combat Team 5, which operates in Anbar province, and died Thursday, the command said.
The two civilians were killed by the gunmen in a drive-by shooting in the al-Qadissya neighborhood of Tikrit, about 80 miles north of Baghdad, police said. Gunmen in the nearby town of Beiji also killed a man who worked for a railroad company.
Elsewhere, a bomb tore through a pipeline southwest of Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad. The pipeline carries oil from Iraq's largest refinery in Beiji to Baghdad's Dora neighborhood, police said.
Iraq's most influential Shiite political leader, meanwhile, said the country will achieve stability only if its own security agencies take full control with no meddling in their work. Addressing a large crowd in the southern holy city of Najaf, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said the unstable security situation was due to "being lax in hunting down terrorists and upholding wrong policies of dealing with them."
