BAGHDAD: Influential Shi'ite cleric Ammar Hakim held talks in Ramadi yesterday with a powerful Sunni tribal sheikh, which observers said were highly symbolic for reconciliation in war-torn Iraq.
The meeting between Hakim, a leading figure of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), and Sheikh Ahmed Abu Reesha, leader of a Sunni coalition in western Anbar province formed to fight Al Qaeda, was tightly guarded by Iraqi troops and police and the US military.
The visit was the first by a leader of the SIIC to the Sunni stronghold in volatile Anbar province, long a bastion of resistance to the US-led invasion and opposition to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government.
Tribal chiefs at the meeting hailed the visit, calling it important for reconciliation in a country riven with bitter sectarian divides that have led to the killings of thousands of Iraqis.
Meanwhile, a bomb left inside a minibus carrying worshippers to a Shi'ite shrine in Baghdad killed six civilians, including a 9 year-old child and two women, and wounded nine others, police said.
The bus was en route to the Iraqi capital's Kazimiyah district when the blast took place. Nine people, including women and children were among the wounded, some reported in serious condition.
Earlier in Kazimiyah, police found a parked booby-trapped minibus and detonated it without any casualties.
In other violence, an Iraqi soldier was killed and four others were wounded when a roadside bomb targeted their patrol in the town Khan Bani Saad, just northeast of Baghdad in the volatile Diyala province. Near the southern town of Hilla, a police officer was fatally shot by gunmen from a speeding car.
Police said that a suicide truck bomber followed by dozens of gunmen in a swarm of vehicles launched a co-ordinated attack on a regional police station north of Baghdad, killing eight Iraqi civilians.
A car bomb killed four people in Baghdad's northern Kadhimiya district yesterday, marring what had been a relatively violence-free Eid.
The district is home to the shrine of a revered Shi'ite imam and has often been targeted in the continuing sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and Sunnis.
Al Qaeda had vowed to step up attacks during Ramadan, and there was an upsurge in bombings and shootings in Iraq earlier in the week.
In another development, Turkish troops sent shells crashing across the Iraqi border into several villages in the autonomous Kurdish region, officials said, as Ankara prepared to ask MPs to approve a ground incursion.
Residents of a village near the northern Iraq border town of Zakhu fled after shells slammed into their homes and farms during a day-long bombardment that caused major damage but no casualties, a spokesman said.
"From this morning until early evening, there was a Turkish attack on villagers near Zakhu. There were no casualties but lots of damage and many families fled to safer areas," he said.
