BAGHDAD, Iraq – A car bomb exploded outside a Shiite mosque Friday where worshippers were celebrating a major Muslim holiday, and a suicide bombers set off an explosives-packed ambulance at a Shiite wedding in attacks that killed at least 21 people and wounded dozens, police and hospital officials said.

The attacks were the latest to target Shiites ahead of the Jan. 30 parliamentary and provincial elections, and they came a day after a chief terror leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounced Shiites in an Internet audio recording. It was the second blast this week outside a Shiite mosque in the capital this week.

The two bombings took place as Sunnis and Shiites were marking one of Islam’s most important holidays, Eid al-Adha, or Feast of Sacrifice. The feast coincides with the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

The car blew up outside the al-Taf mosque in southwestern Baghdad just as worshippers were leaving prayers in the building, a witness said. At least 14 people were killed and 40 others wounded, said an official at Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital.

South of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated a booby-trapped ambulance Friday at a wedding party being thrown by the Shiite Buamer tribe in a village near Youssifiyah, killing at least seven people and injuring 16, hospital officials said.

Salah al-Ameri, a cousin of the groom, said the attacker drove the ambulance into the garden where the celebration was taking place and set off the blast. The groom and bride were hurt, he said.

The Buamer tribe has had tense relations with Sunni Muslim clans in the area, local residents say, and several of their members have been killed or kidnapped by Sunni insurgents.

Iraq’s Shiites – a community that was oppressed for decades – strongly supports the upcoming election, believing it will propel them to a position of influence equal to their standing as the country’s majority group. They make up an estimated 60 percent of the Iraq’s 26 million people.

But militants among the Sunni Arab minority – which lost privilege when their patron Saddam Hussein was toppled – have vowed to stop the election. Some Sunni clerics and politicians have called for a boycott, saying violence in Sunni areas will keep people from the polls and skew the outcome of the balloting against them.

In a new Internet audio recording, a speaker purported to be al-Zarqawi, Iraq’s most feared terror leader, denounced Iraqi Shiites for fighting alongside U.S. troops and asked Iraqis to prepare for a long war against the Americans.

Al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of Iraq’s al-Qaida affiliate, ridiculed Iraq’s most prominent Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and berated Shiites for fighting against their Sunni countrymen in the U.S.-led assault on Fallujah in November.

“They broke into the safe houses of God,” the speaker said of Shiites. “They defiled them and they hung the photos of their Satan, al-Sistani, on the walls and they spitefully wrote: ‘Today, your land; tomorrow it will be your honor.”‘

The authenticity of the tape could not be verified.

The blast at the al-Taf mosque left several cars in flames and showered the area with charred debris

Dozens of weeping men and women frantically searched the hospital for news about loved ones feared caught up in the bombing.

A distraught man sat beside his dead 14-year-old son, covered with a sheet, and cried out, “I had breakfast with him this morning. I told him, ‘Let’s go to your grandfather,’ but he insisted on going for prayers first.”

A woman dressed in a black cloak, or abaya, fainted as she identified the body of her son in the hospital’s morgue and was carried away by relatives.

During Friday prayers at Baghdad’s Um al-Quraa mosque, a prominent Sunni cleric issued a fresh call for putting off the elections until the country is more secure and free of its foreign occupiers.

“How does the government call for holding elections at a time when it cannot protect places of worship in the country?” Sheikh Mahmoud al-Sumaidei said. “It is important to have a country free from occupation forces before holding elections.”

West of Baghdad, a dozen gunmen stormed a police station Friday and blew it up, police said. No one was hurt in the attack, but the militants reportedly made off with police weapons and other gear.

Insurgents burst into the station, which was nearly empty for the holiday, and placed explosives inside, said Iraqi police Capt. Abdullah al-Hiti. The blast destroyed the station in the center of the town of Hit, some 100 miles west of Baghdad.

A U.S. soldier was killed Friday during a pre-dawn raid north of Baghdad, the military said. The soldier from Army’s 1st Infantry Division was killed in an operation against members of a bomb-making cell in the town of Duluiyah, the military said in a statement.

One Iraqi was killed in the raid and another soldier was wounded.

Also in the area, Iraqi Army soldiers in the city of Baqouba found a body with its hands tied and throat cut, the U.S. military said Friday. There were no other details.

In the northern city of Mosul, U.S. troops shot and killed three insurgents who attacked a police vehicle, a military spokesman said. For a second day, insurgents shelled a hospital in the city where U.S. and Iraqi forces have taken up positions, residents said. There was no word on casualties.

An Italian soldier was killed Friday by a burst of gunfire while riding in a helicopter that was patrolling the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah, Italy’s Defense Ministry said. The area has been deemed safe for elections.

In northern Iraq, insurgents attacked two schools that are to be used as polling stations later this month, but no one was hurt, police said. One of the schools was hit with a rocket, and police dismantled a bomb planted at a third school.

Near the central city of Samarra, saboteurs set an oil pipeline on fire, police said. The pipeline, 12 miles south of the city, links the northern Beiji refinery to Baghdad’s Dora refinery.

The pipeline was attacked in the past by insurgents who have taken aim at the oil industry to deprive the government of badly needed reconstruction money.