Iraqis try to avert civil war

Religious and political leaders in Iraq are scrambling to forestall further sectarian bloodshed in the aftermath of a provocative series of car bombings against Shiite targets that threatens all-out civil war.

Half a dozen blasts killed more than 50 people in the Shiite slum of Sadr City on Sunday, raising the one-day death toll around Baghdad to at least 80. Gunmen of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia deployed in some areas as Iraqis braced for a resumption of sectarian killing.

Politicians are struggling to fill a leadership vacuum that has delayed the sitting of the new parliament - seen as a crucial step toward a unity government that could check Iraq's violent spiral - until Thursday. But Iraqi and American officials are warning that sectarian abuses such as torture and summary executions, by illegal militias and official forces alike, are leading Iraq deeper into civil war.

"If the army and police and [US] forces don't cooperate to control the street, we will see more killing that will lead to civil war," says a Shiite Iraqi police colonel, who asked not to be named.

The firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called on his followers to avoid revenge, for now. "I could order the Mahdi Army to root out the terrorists and fundamentalists but this would lead us into civil war and we don't want that," Mr. Sadr said Monday. "So, I will keep calling for calm."

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said the bombings aimed to "inflame sectarian strife and fan the fires of civil war," and called on deadlocked political factions to "intensify" efforts to create a government that can "achieve security and stability."

Numerous corpses appear on the streets of the capital daily, often handcuffed and showing signs of torture. Most are Sunnis, killed by alleged death squads operating with little accountability inside the Shiite-dominated Ministry of Interior (MOI).

Nine more Iraqis died Monday, including seven policemen. The bodies of four Shiites were also found Monday in Sadr City, apparently tortured, with a sign that read "traitors."

"It's mostly revenge, revenge - it's sectarian revenge," laments the police colonel. "The police always find the bodies. People come, and I ask them: 'Who killed your sons?' They say: 'The commandos [of the MOI] came in the night.' "

The spike in tensions is spurring US-backed marathon crisis talks among Iraqi leaders who began Monday to shape a national unity government. US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad says there was an "urgent" need to fill the "vacuum in authority" as attacks mount by "terrorists to provoke sectarian conflict."

A nighttime curfew is meant to stop all nonofficial traffic so that only Iraqi security forces can get through checkpoints. But an array of security organs - often unaware of what each other are doing, or even who they are - has meant little accountability.

Interior Ministry police effectiveness is "seriously compromised by sectarian influences of militias," notes the 2005 US State Department Human Rights report for Iraq, released last week. "The police - particularly the Special Police - abducted, detained, and tortured individuals. According to a variety of reports, police engaged in extrajudicial killings, particularly of members of the Sunni Arab minority."

In this "climate of extreme violence," the US report said, "reports increased of killings by the government or its agents ... [and] criminals, insurgents, and terrorists undermined public confidence in the security apparatus by sometimes masking their identity in police and Army uniforms."

The report quoted Baktiar Amin, Iraq's former minister for human rights, saying a year ago that MOI detention centers were a "theater of violations of human rights."

Further complicating the picture is the fact that most high-profile attacks have been carried out by Sunni insurgents against Shiite civilians and holy places to spark sectarian war. The destruction of the gold-dome Askariya shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22 revealed the dire possibilities: well over 500 Iraqis died in the aftermath, many of them Sunnis.

Page: 1 | 2