Interior
Ministry spokesman Saad Maan
told The Associated Press that the
assailants ambushed a car Thursday night carrying the clerics in the
mostly Sunni district of Bab al-Zubeir near Basra, shooting dead the
three and seriously wounding two other clerics traveling with them.
The ministry, he said, was investigating the killings. He gave no other details.
There was no claim of responsibility for the ambush and no reports of retaliatory attacks by Sunnis.
Iraq's
sectarian violence peaked in 2006-07, when thousands of Shiites and
Sunnis perished in attacks. The violence later eased but has partially
resumed after Sunni militants of the Islamic State group swept across
much of northern and western Iraq last year.
Shiites
make up a majority of Iraq's estimated 30 million people and have
dominated successive governments since the 2003 ouster of Saddam
Hussein, a member of the Sunni minority who oppressed the Shiites during
his rule.
The attack
followed a visit to Basra this week by Shiite Prime Minister Haider
al-Abadi and his tour of a Sunni area north of Baghdad on New Year's
Eve. Al-Abadi on both visits spoke emphatically about the need for all
of Iraq's religious and ethnic communities to close ranks in the face of
the threat posed by the Islamic State group.
An
association of Sunni clerics also called for calm in a statement issued
Friday, arguing that the attack was carried out to ignite sectarian
violence in Basra. Speaking later on state Iraqi television, the
association's head, Khaled al-Mullah, said the Islamic State group and
its supporters were the only beneficiaries of the attack.
In
other violence Friday, a roadside bomb exploded in central Baghdad,
killing four civilians and wounding 12, police and hospital officials
said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to speak to journalists.
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