Gunmen ambush bus in Baghdad, kill 10: police

By Ibon Villelabeitia

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Sectarian violence rocked Baghdad again
on Tuesday, as gunmen ambushed a minibus it drove through a
Sunni neighborhood bringing Shiites from a funeral and killing
10 of those aboard, police said.

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the fortified
Green Zone government compound, killing five people and
wounding 10, as parliament prepared to meet a few hundred
meters away.

The minibus attack in the violent southern Doura district
comes a day after Iraq’s prime minister pleaded for Iraqis to
“unite as brothers” following a fresh spasm of violence over
the weekend that pushed Iraq deeper into communal warfare.

Though bombings have claimed dozens of lives at a time, a
wave of tit-for-killings between Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad
has raised the specter of all-out civil war, dealing a blow to
Nuri al-Maliki’s hopes for national reconciliation.

Police said gunmen in cars opened fire on the minibus,
which was returning from a funeral in the holy city of Najaf,
160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad.

On Monday, gunmen ambushed a commuter bus in a Sunni
district in western Baghdad and shot dead seven people.
Earlier, two bombs in a Shiite neighborhood killed 12 and
wounded dozens. Militiamen, believed to be Shiite, also fought
gun battles in a southern Sunni district.

In a dramatic escalation of sectarian bloodletting, Shiite
militiamen went on rampage in a Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday,
setting up checkpoints and hauling people with Sunni-sounding
names from cars. Dozens have been killed in recent days.

A tense calm returned to a Baghdad neighborhood on Tuesday
where heavy clashes erupted overnight between sectarian gunmen.

Iraqi police set up checkpoints around the Ghazaliya
district to prevent fighters from entering the area, where the
sound of machinegun fire and blasts from rocket-propelled
grenades boomed well into the night.

A Reuters journalist who lives in the western district,
home to both Shiite and Sunni communities, said the gunmen
withdrew after midnight and resident were venturing out of
their homes.

A Shiite political source said local Shiites in Ghazaliya
took up arms after Sunnis fired on them. U.S. troops moved into
the area as the violence subsided, police said. The U.S.
military has made no comment.

“SLIPPERY SLOPE”

Fearing Iraq is moving ever closer to all-out civil war,
President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, had appealed for calm,
warning the country was on “the edge of a slippery slope.”

A new surge in violence between majority Shiites, oppressed
under Saddam Hussein but now politically empowered, and his
once dominant fellow Sunni Arabs has laid bare a deepening
schism, despite Maliki’s efforts to promote reconciliation.

Militias loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr
rejected accusations by Sunni leaders and police that it was
behind the rampage killings in the mainly Sunni Jihad district
of west Baghdad on Sunday.

Those killings, the worst of their kind yet seen in the
city, came after a car bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Jihad
on Saturday evening and were followed by a double car bombing
at another Shiite mosque late on Sunday that killed 19.

Maliki has vowed to disband militias, some tied to parties
in his government, that are carving Baghdad into sectarian
no-go areas. But he faces an uphill struggle as most, including
the Mehdi Army, have powerful allies inside the ruling
coalition.

In more violence on Tuesday, gunmen kidnapped an Iraqi
consul who is posted in Iran from his house in Baghdad on
Tuesday, police and Interior Ministry sources said.

Wissam Abdulla al-Awadi, Iraq’s consul in the Iranian city
of Kermanshah, was snatched in the predominantly Shiite Ammil
district in southwestern Baghdad by gunmen in two cars, police
said. Abdulla al-Awadi was in Baghdad visiting his family.

It was not clear which group was behind the kidnapping.

After fighting Shiite Iran in the 1980s under Saddam, the
new Shiite-led government of Baghdad resumed diplomatic
relations with Tehran. Many Sunni groups now leading the
insurgency view Shiites as apostates and accuse the Iraqi
government of being Iranian pawns.