Allawi attacked outside shrine in Najaf

NAJAF, Iraq — One of Iraq's most prominent politicians and his entourage were pelted with rocks and shoes Sunday as they left a shrine, escalating tensions between religious and secular Shiite Muslim factions 11 days before parliamentary elections that will set the country's course for the next four years.

Ayad Allawi, the former interim prime minister now leading a major political coalition, said he and his bodyguards were attacked with gunfire in an assassination attempt outside the Imam Ali Shrine in this Euphrates River city, a claim disputed by local authorities.

Allawi and his deputies suggested that supporters of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is aligned with rival Shiite coalition the United Iraqi Alliance, had planned the attack. Al-Sadr's aides brushed aside Allawi's accusations.

The incident highlighted long-simmering antagonism between the secular, tough-talking Allawi and religious Shiites ahead of the Dec. 15 elections. Allawi's ideologically far-flung coalition of democratic liberals and former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party is vying with the United Iraqi Alliance's clergy-led list of Islamic political parties for votes among the nation's Shiite majority.

A U.S. soldier assigned to Task Force Baghdad was killed today when a patrol hit a roadside bomb in east Baghdad, the U.S. command said.

On Sunday, two U.S. soldiers were killed when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle convoy in southeastern Baghdad.

Those deaths bring to 2,128 the number of U.S. military personnel who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

A roadside bomb also killed two civilians in a downtown square. And in separate incidents throughout Baghdad, gunmen assassinated a police lieutenant colonel, an army major, two police officers, a university professor and a Shiite cleric loyal to al-Sadr.

Sunday's melee in Najaf erupted after Allawi prayed at the shrine, which houses the tomb of the prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law and is widely considered the most sacred Islamic site in Iraq.

As a crowd of between 50 and 70 men hit Allawi with rocks as well as footwear — the latter an act considered a dreadful insult by Iraqis and Muslims — his bodyguards surrounded him, fired weapons into the air to disperse a gathering mob and hustled him to safety. He was escorted to a U.S. military base north of Najaf, then taken to the capital, said an Allawi representative in Najaf.

Speaking before television cameras in Baghdad after the incident, an angry Allawi suggested those responsible for the melee were linked to the same elements that killed moderate Shiite cleric Abdul Majid Khoei in Najaf after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Iraqi authorities have alleged that al-Sadr had a hand in the assassination, though he has never been arrested.

Allawi said the attackers, captured on videotape, wore black, as do members of a militia loyal to al-Sadr.

Saheb Ameri, head of a Najaf cultural institute controlled by al-Sadr, said the clerics' followers had nothing to do with Sunday's incident.

"It was not organized," he said. "It was just people's ordinary reaction. The people expressed themselves toward secular, unpatriotic leaders."

Allawi, who at one time had ties to U.S. and British intelligence, called on local and national authorities to investigate the attack, in which he said he avoided assassination only because one of the assailants fumbled his weapon.

The governor of Najaf, Asad abu Kalal, told reporters there were no weapons involved.