Bomb attacks on a Shiite mosque and elsewhere in southern Baghdad killed at least 15 people Friday as a top religious official urged unity among Iraqis in the fight against ISIS. The deadliest of the attacks targeted the mosque in the Iraqi capital's Nahiyet al-Rasheed neighborhood. A roadside bomb blast went off on the street outside the mosque just as worshippers were finishing Friday prayers, police said. Within minutes, a suicide bomber inside the mosque detonated an explosives vest. Ten people were killed and 28 were wounded in that coordinated attack, according to police. Two separate roadside bombs exploded in commercial areas of southeast Baghdad, killing five people and wounding nine, security officials said. Hospital officials confirmed the casualties. Like the police, they spoke on condition of anonymity. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but near daily attacks in Baghdad are often claimed by ISIS. In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, the representative of Iraq's most influential Shiite religious authority called for unity in the fight against ISIS and condemned recent attacks abroad claimed by the group. "The attacks that captured the world's attention including the Russian aircraft bombing and the bombings in Beirut and Paris claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians," said Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's representative, Sheikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalai. "The Iraqi people are on the frontline of this fight against terrorism," he said referring to the battle with the group, which controls Iraq's second largest city of Mosul and key urban areas in Iraq's Anbar province. He called the threat from the group "the greatest challenge and danger to the Iraqi people of all religions, sects and ethnic groups." Despite more than a year of intense airstrikes carried out by a U.S.-led coalition supporting Iraqi ground operations, the war against ISIS in Iraq is largely at a stalemate. Kurdish forces in Iraq's north cut a key highway as they pushed ISIS forces out of the town of Sinjar, but the larger cities that make up the backbone of the group's operations in Iraq remain under tight ISIS control. The U.S. military said Friday that a U.S. airstrike that targeted ISIS checkpoint in Iraq in March likely killed four civilians, one of whom may have been a child. U.S. Air Forces Central Command began investigating the March 13 airstrike by an A-10 tank-killer jet near Al-Hatra, Iraq, on April 20 after an Iraqi citizen reported that her car had been destroyed and its passengers killed. "The preponderance of the evidence gathered during the investigation indicates that the airstrikes likely resulted in the deaths of four non-combatants," the military said in a statement. While reports indicated one of the people may have been a child, "no positive identification can be made with reasonable certainty as to gender or age without further forensic examination or other evidence that is not available to the coalition," the statement said. The U.S. military has rarely acknowledged causing civilian casualties in the fight against ISIS militants, but is investigating several dozen strikes in which civilians were reported killed.
