A car bomb killed at least six Shi'ite pilgrims south of Baghdad today, the latest in a wave of attacks that had prompted a fresh warning against civil war in Iraq.
The blast near a Shi'ite shrine in the town of Musayib also wounded 16 people, said police Captain Muthana al-Ma'amouri.
Just two hours earlier, powerful Shi'ite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim had urged his followers to stand firm against what he called an al Qaeda campaign to ignite sectarian civil war with bombings like one on Friday that killed at least 70 people.
That triple suicide bombing at the Buratha mosque in Baghdad, the biggest single suicide attack on a Shi'ite target since November 2005, raised fresh fears of a full-blown communal conflict, with the United States, Britain and UN quickly urging Iraqi unity.
On Thursday, a car bomb near one of the world's most sacred Shi'ite shrines killed at least 15 people in the southern town of Najaf.
Hakim's speech, delivered on the anniversary of the execution of top Shi'ite cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister by Saddam Hussein, called for unity between Iraq's main Shi'ite, Kurdish and Arab Sunni communities.
But he also reminded majority Shi'ites of their decades of suffering under Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime and urged them to resist attempts by the al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to plunge the country into open civil war.
"(Sunni) militants and insurgents want to return Iraq to Saddam's formula," said Hakim, leader of the pro-Iranian Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a party in the ruling Shi'ite Alliance.
"This nation will not fall into the trap of sectarian war that is being pursued by Zarqawi's groups."