Pat Dollard

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The LA Times:

A 15-year-old boy gunned down Harith Obeidi, who had just given a sermon at a Baghdad mosque. The teen also shot and killed four other people before being shot to death by guards.

Reporting from Baghdad — The head of the Iraqi parliament’s largest Sunni Arab bloc was gunned down by a teenager today after delivering an afternoon prayer sermon. The killing raised fears the coming months will see a sharp rise in assassinations and other violence, as most American forces depart from Iraq and campaigning intensifies with national elections scheduled for January.

The teenager opened fire on Harith Obeidi, who led the Iraqi Accordance Front bloc in parliament, at the Shawaf mosque compound in western Baghdad’s Yarmuk neighborhood.

Obeidi was shot twice in the head by the 15-year-old boy, who then opened fire on the lawmaker’s bodyguard and lobbed a hand grenade, a police official said. Mosque guards eventually gunned him down, but not before he had killed five people, including Obeidi, and wounded 12 more, the official said.

Accounts varied as police said Obeidi was shot after he had walked out of the mosque, while witnesses and some politicians claimed the teenager barged inside the religious sanctuary and then opened fire and tossed the grenade.

Obeidi, born in 1964, was dressed in a traditional white dishdasha robe and headdress as he issued a veiled criticism of the government in his sermon. He lashed out over the continuing detention of Iraqis, held with limited access to the Iraqi judiciary.

“Nobody can tell the leader, the ruler, the judge that you forgot that person… And this detainee remains in the prison, nobody knows about him except God!” said Obeidi, who served on the parliament’s human rights committee.

Politicians of all stripes joined in condemning the attack, including the Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, whose relations with Obeidi’s parliament bloc have often been strained. Maliki vowed an investigation into the assassination.

On Thursday, the prime minister had warned that he expected violence to increase ahead of the June 30 withdrawal of U.S. forces from cities and upcoming national elections.

Obeidi’s Accordance Front blamed the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq for the attack. The extremist organization has long targeted Sunni politicians for participating in the U.S.-sponsored political process.

“There are outlaws from Qaeda we think were connected to this attack,” said the political bloc’s spokesman, Selim Abdullah Jabouri. “We hope this will not bring back sectarianism. Whoever says security is good, this is proof that security has not been implemented yet.”

Jabouri said nearly 80 Iraqi Accordance Front members had been killed in the last two years. The bloc has been strained in recent months by an internal dispute over who should be the parliament’s speaker.

Iraq’s security has improved dramatically in the last two years, but attacks occur regularly in Baghdad and in outlying provinces including Nineveh and Diyala. At the height of the country’s civil warfare in 2006 and 2007, assassinations and suicide bombings sparked tit-for-tat violence among Sunnis and Shiites. The U.S. troop buildup of 2007 has been credited with helping tamp down the bloodshed, but it is unclear how the American withdrawal from bases inside cities will affect the situation over the long run.