(Adds Badr organisation denies bombing) By Aseel Kami and Hadir Abbas BAGHDAD, April 8 (Reuters) - A roadside bomb in the Shi'ite Kadhimiya district in northwest Baghdad killed seven people and wounded 23 on Wednesday, police said, a day after a bomb in the same area killed nine. Kadhimiya is home to one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines, and the blast bore the hallmarks of Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, which considers Iraq's majority Shi'ites heretics and often attacks their mosques and religious festivals. "What are the targets of these explosions? What do they want? They just target innocent people," said Adnan Raheem, lying in a stretcher at Kadhimiya hospital after being wounded in the blast. Unconscious children lay nearby. "Children, young people, the elderly -- do these savages ask what they gain from these awful acts?" Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups are still capable of frequent large-scale attacks, despite a sharp drop in violence in Iraq in the past year. U.S. President Barack Obama hailed the improvement in security during a visit to Baghdad on Tuesday. Obama has ordered the U.S. military to withdraw combat troops from Iraq by Aug. 31, 2010, raising questions about how prepared the Iraqi security forces are to handle threats from militant groups by themselves. A day before Obama's visit, an apparently coordinated series of seven car bombs killed 37 people in the capital. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed Monday's attacks on members of Saddam Hussein's once-powerful Baath party, labelling the blasts their "gift" to mark Tuesday's 62nd anniversary of the party's foundation in Syria. The head of the Badr Organisation, the armed wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (ISCI), denied reports from a security source that it might have been behind Monday's bombs. ISCI is a Shi'ite Islamist party allied to Maliki's Dawa party in parliament, although the two have recently become somewhat estranged. "These accusations ... are the price we pay for the steadfast position of Badr and ISCI against the return of the Baath party," Badr leader Hadi al-Amiri told the ISCI-owned Al Furat TV station. "The prime minister himself says the Baath party and al Qaeda are responsible for these terrorist acts. Security officials assure us that al Qaeda and the Baath party lie behind the recent bombs," he said. The current leader of the outlawed Baath party, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the most senior of Saddam Hussein's aides still at large, urged Iraqi insurgents to continue their struggle in a statement issued on Tuesday. "I call upon you ... to be unified to destroy what remains of the invading forces and their agents," he said, an apparent reference to the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. Thursday is the sixth anniversary of Baghdad's fall to invading U.S. troops, when a giant Saddam statue was pulled down in Firdos Square. Huge crowds are expected to join protests against the U.S. military presence in Iraq. (Reporting by Aseel Kami and Hadir Abbas; Writing by Mohammed Abbas and Tim Cocks)
Police detain a demonstrator during anti-U.S. protests in Istanbul April 7, 2009. U.S. President Barack Obama is on the last leg of his debut trip on the world stage as president. ...
