Deadly attacks against Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslims have multiplied ahead of elections that the majority community is expected to win, as United States Secretary of State Colin Powell warned that an unrepresentative vote could ultimately ”embolden” insurgents.
Amid relentless violence in which more than a dozen Iraqis died in 24 hours, warnings intensified that the country risks sliding into civil war between its various faiths and breaking up.
A bomb killed seven people, including four police officers, and wounded 38 others late on Thursday outside a Shi’ite mosque in Khan Bani Said, north of Baghdad.
”The car was parked in front of a Shi’ite mosque and it exploded as the faithful were leaving evening prayers,” the local security services office said.
The same evening, gunmen shot dead another member of Iraq’s electoral commission, west of Baghdad, an interior ministry official said on Friday.
He was the eighth electoral official to be killed in the run-up to the poll planned for January 30.
The deadly nature of the war was underscored by an ambush set up by US troops near a mosque in north Baghdad late on Thursday.
The troops shot dead seven Iraqis who started setting up a mortar post near the Abu Hanifa Sunni mosque. US Brigadier General Jeffrey Hammond, the deputy commander for the US army in Baghdad, confirmed that snipers had lain in wait in the area from where they expected insurgents to fire.
Hammond said the First Cavalry Division regularly sends out snipers to areas from where they suspect insurgents might fire mortars.
Early on Friday, an Iraqi police officer was killed and an Iraqi soldier kidnapped in separate incidents to the north of Baghdad, police and military sources said.
The attacks came after an aide to Iraq’s top Shi’ite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the aide’s son and four bodyguards were murdered on Wednesday night after they left prayers in the Sunni-majority town of Salman Pak, south-east of the capital.
On Friday, an Islamist group in Iraq claimed responsibility for killing him.
A statement, whose authenticity could not be verified, was signed by the ”Ansar Al-Islam Group — Brigade of Saad bin Abi Waqas”. It warned that the attack ”is only the first and will not be the last by our group”.
Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq’s majority Shi’ites, is not running for office but has emerged as the kingmaker after he blessed the front-running United Iraqi Alliance of political and religious parties.
Fears of sectarian strife
The spate of attacks against Shi’ites reinforced fears of sectarian strife ahead of and after Iraq’s January 30 vote, which Shi’ite movements are expected to win easily and most Sunni groups have pledged to boycott.
Many fear the Sunnis will feel excluded from the process and could vent their frustration through violence. Outgoing chief US diplomat Powell again emphasised the importance of all groups taking part if the vote is to succeed.
”I think the Sunnis want to have an opportunity to speak, with respect to how they wish to be led,” he told PBS radio. ”And so I think a successful election will be an election where most of the population has a chance to vote.”
Powell expressed confidence that ”there will be sufficient turnout so that you get a sense of what the Sunnis want to do” and suggested a failure to achieve that will be a setback for the transition to self-rule.
But he warned the elections will not end the violence and said ”the insurgents might become more emboldened” if the ballot turns out to be less than successful.
An even starker warning came from Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, who warned of civil war and the eventual break-up of Iraq if the situation does not improve.
”If the situation in Iraq does not change, there are risks of civil war and the partition of the country into small states on a confessional basis,” Nazif said in Amman.
Iraqi elder statesman Adnan Pachachi on Friday urged Iraqi expatriates living in Jordan to vote in Iraq’s elections as a way to end foreign occupation and Muslim extremism.
”If we stay in our homes we will have only ourselves to blame if something goes wrong. A big turnout is the only guarantee” to end the occupation of Iraq, said Pachachi, referring to the more than 150 000 US-led troops in his country.
Other news
In other violence, two US marines were killed on Thursday in Iraq’s violence-wracked western Al-Anbar province. The deaths raise the toll to 1 355 soldiers killed in action since the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
In the US, witnesses at a prison abuse court martial in Texas said interrogators at Abu Ghraib routinely told female US soldiers to ridicule naked Iraqi detainees and encouraged MPs to rough up prisoners.
Megan Ambuhl, who was dismissed from the army last year after pleading guilty for her role in the abuses at the US-run prison near Baghdad, was called to the witness stand by Specialist Charles Graner’s lawyers. They rested their case after struggling to demonstrate that their client was merely following orders while at Abu Ghraib in late 2003.
Human Rights Watch also urged the US government on Thursday to name a special prosecutor to investigate the Abu Ghraib scandal, calling it one of the most flagrant examples of human rights violations in 2004. — Sapa-AFP