Car bomb on HQ of Iraqi shi’ite party kills 13

BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomber killed 13 people outside the offices of a major Iraqi Shi'ite political party on Monday but SCIRI leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim survived and said his thousands of armed militiamen would not fight back.

Blaming the morning rush hour attack in Baghdad on the alliance of Islamists and Sunni Arab followers of Saddam Hussein seen to be behind Iraq's insurgency, Hakim called for calm, five weeks before an election that may put him in government.

"We have chosen the path of non-violence and we will stick to it," Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), told Reuters from his devastated compound. Many of his family have been assassinated.

The party, founded in Iran in 1982, has an armed wing, the Badr Brigade, many thousands strong, which Hakim commanded against Saddam's forces during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Police said 13 were people killed and 53 wounded in the blast outside SCIRI's main office in the Jadriya district in the south of the Iraqi capital.

Eight days ago, twin suicide car bombs in the Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala, which killed nearly 70 people, were dismissed by Shi'ite leaders as an attempt to spark sectarian conflict. They vowed not to respond in kind.

SCIRI, a religious party set up by exiled Iraqi Shi'ites in Iran, is expected to be one of the strongest contenders in the country's first post-Saddam election on Jan. 30.

Hakim heads a coalition list approved by Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and could have a senior role in the next government.

Hakim's brother and party leader was assassinated in August last year in a bombing at a major Shi'ite shrine in the southern holy city of Najaf.

LEADERSHIP UNHURT

Party officials said none of the leadership was hurt, but several employees had been taken to hospital.

"The car exploded at the gate to the offices, near the reception area," one party official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We took several guards and receptionists to the hospital," he said.

US and Iraqi forces sealed off the area, near a busy intersection in the capital.

US and Iraqi officials have said they expected a rise in violence in the run-up to the election.

In the past few weeks, since parties were officially registered and marked down to run in the poll, there have been several political killings and bombings.

At least three people from the Iraqi Hezbollah party have been killed. Iraqi Hezbollah is allied to SCIRI as part of a Shi'ite-led coalition called the United Iraqi Alliance.

Hakim's United Iraqi Alliance coalition is expected to do well in the poll, particularly if there is a high turnout among the country's 60 per cent Shi'ite majority.

Sistani, who holds huge sway in the Shi'ite community, has issued a religious edict obliging all Shi'ites to vote.

Leaders of Iraq's 20 per cent Sunni Arab minority, from which the country's insurgency draws much of its support and which dominated Iraq under fellow Sunni Saddam, fear that violence affecting mostly Sunni Muslim areas will make it impossible to hold free and fair elections next month.

- REUTERS