Baghdad, Iraq ? Insurgents intent on disrupting Iraq’s election turned their firepower against Iraq’s Shiite community Friday, killing at least 22 in suicide bombings targeting a mosque and a wedding party.

In what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to inflame sectarian tensions ahead of the poll, a suicide bomber rammed into a Shiite mosque in a Sunni neighborhood of southwestern Baghdad, killing 15 people and wounding more than 40, according to a spokesman at Baghdad’s Yarmuk hospital.

The bombing at the Shuhada al Taf mosque coincided with Shiite celebrations for the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, and most of the dead were worshippers leaving the mosque after attending special holiday services.

Sunnis had celebrated the start of the four-day holiday Thursday, in just one example of the many doctrinal and ceremonial differences between the two branches of Islam whose rivalries are growing in Iraq as the Jan. 30 election approaches.

Later Friday, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed ambulance into a Shiite wedding party in the mostly Sunni town of al-Yussifiyah south of Baghdad, killing seven and wounding dozens, according to The Associated Press.

Kadhem al-Shibli, the sheik of the Shiite Buamer tribe in the area, said dozens of members of his tribe were celebrating the wedding when the bomber struck Friday evening. He said he believed at least 20 had died. “It was dark, and there were so many people killed and injured it was impossible to say how many,” he said.

Friday’s attacks were the latest in a growing campaign of violence against Iraq’s majority Shiites, and they came a day after an inflammatory attack on Shiites by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian born Sunni extremist who says he represents al-Qaida in Iraq.

Both of Friday’s attacks targeted Shiites living in majority Sunni areas.