Suicide bombers ripped through a Shi’ite market in northern Iraq on Friday and mortars crashed on rival Baghdad neighbourhoods, ramping up sectarian tension a day after the bloodiest bombing of the conflict killed 202 people.
As political leaders pleaded for restraint and imposed a curfew on the capital to avert all-out civil war, two bombers killed 22 people at Tal Afar near the Syrian border.
The Shi’ite faction that controls Baghdad’s Sadr City slum, target of Thursday’s attack, demanded the prime minister cancel a summit next week with United States President George Bush.
The demand was made as the people of Sadr City bore away their dead, marching behind coffins and chanting in anger and sorrow for the victims.
Moqtada al-Sadr, the young cleric whose Mehdi Army militia dominates Sadr City, told chanting supporters in a Friday sermon that the most prominent religious figure from the Sunni minority must issue a fatwa demanding an end to the killing of Shi’ites.
One of Sadr’s top political aides in Parliament told Reuters it would pull out of the US-backed national-unity government and from Parliament if Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki went ahead with next week’s meeting with Bush in Jordan.
”We have asked Maliki to cancel his meeting with Bush as there is no reason to meet the criminal who is behind terrorism in Iraq,” Faleh Hasan Shanshal said. ”We will suspend our membership in Parliament and the Cabinet if he goes ahead.”
Bush has been expected to discuss with Maliki ways of giving Iraqi security forces more control to raise the prospect of US troops starting to withdraw. But the competence and sectarian loyalties of the US-trained Iraqi forces are in grave doubt.
Political manoeuvres
Maliki is under pressure from an increasingly anxious Washington to make good on promises to disband Sadr’s and other Shi’ite militias, which US officials say control parts of the police and army. But the prime minister is dependent on Sadr and his fellow Shi’ite Islamists to maintain his own position.
Sadr, whose Mehdi Army rose up twice in 2004 against US forces, has long demanded their withdrawal and seemed to be seeking to capitalise on the carnage in his Baghdad stronghold to press his case. Another 250 were wounded in the series of six car bombs and several mortar blasts late on Thursday afternoon.
He called for restraint from his followers, although similar public statements after the bombing of a major Shi’ite shrine at Samarra in February failed to prevent thousands of reprisal, many of which killings Sunni leaders blame on the Mehdi Army.
Many Sunnis, the dominant minority under Saddam Hussein and the source of the long insurgency against US occupation, now fear that a rapid withdrawal of the 140 000 American troops could unleash an all-out offensive by Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias.
”The situation is now moving to some sort of open civil war,” said Iraqi security analyst Mustafa al-Alani of the Gulf Research Centre in Dubai. ”The situation now gradually becomes more beyond control. Neither the Americans nor the Iraqi government can control it.”
Barring security forces, the only movement in the streets of the capital was the thousands of mourners as they began their journey south to the holy city of Najaf, traditional burial site for pious Shi’ites.
”At the end of the day we are all losers,” said local man Hassan in Sadr City as the funeral processions passed by. ”This is our home, our country. Sunnis and Shi’ites must come together to rebuild our country so we can breathe the air.” — Reuters