BAGHDAD — Gunmen killed three Sunni clerics near the mostly Shiite city of Basra in southern Iraq, a government spokesman said Friday, an apparent sectarian attack that drew immediate calls for calm.



Interior Ministry spokesman Saad Maan told The Associated Press that the assailants ambushed a car Thursday night carrying the clerics in the mostly Sunni district of Bab Al-Zubeir near Basra, shooting dead the three and seriously wounding two other clerics traveling with them.



The ministry, he said, was investigating the killings. He gave no other details. There was no claim of responsibility for the ambush and no reports of retaliatory attacks by Sunnis.



The attack followed a visit to Basra this week by Shiite Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi and his tour of a Sunni area north of Baghdad on New Year’s Eve.



Al-Abadi on both visits spoke emphatically about the need for all of Iraq’s religious and ethnic communities to close ranks in the face of the threat posed by the Islamic State group. — AP