Muslim clerics call for calm after Kirkuk restaurant bombing

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Muslim clerics appealed for calm Friday, one day after a suicide bomber killed 55 people - including women and children - at a local restaurant in the deadliest attack in Iraq in six months. The attack appeared aimed at a meeting of local Kurdish, Arab and Turkomen leaders who had gathered at the Abdullah restaurant to discuss ways to reduce ethnic tension in this oil-rich city. But many of the victims had simply come to the restaurant with their families to celebrate the end of the four-day Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha. "Yesterday, the terrorists killed innocent people regardless of their religious and ethnic background," Serwan Ahmed, a Kurdish preacher, told 900 worshippers at the Iskan mosque.