Shiite mob torches Kurdish party office

Shiite mob torches Kurdish party office
By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The bodies of two American service members missing since a helicopter crash this week were found west of Baghdad, officials said Friday, while gunmen loyal to a radical Shiite cleric torched an office of the Iraqi president's Kurdish party.

About 50 gunmen in the northern city of Kut stormed the office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by President Jalal Talabani, beat up the guards and set the building on fire, said police Lt. Othman al-Lami. The attackers accused the party's official newspaper of criticizing Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammed al-Yacoubi.

The raid in Kut was another demonstration of Iraq's sectarian and ethnic divisions that have exploded into violence, mostly between Shiite and Sunni Arabs. It came a day after a suicide bomber killed 35 people in front of Iraq's most sacred Shiite shrine, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf.

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Pamphlets distributed by the attackers in Kut said the Kurdish newspaper accused al-Yacoubi of trying to "ignite a war between the Arab Shiites and Kurds" by claiming that Kurds are targeting other ethnic groups. The largely Sunni Kurds are a separate, non-Arab ethnic group.

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