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Sunnis, Shiites Targeted in Series of Baghdad Bombings

Posted on: Tuesday, 28 February 2006, 21:00 CST

BAGHDAD, Iraq _ A surge of bombings in Baghdad on Tuesday killed at least 60 people as the sectarian tensions stirred by last week's attack on a major Shiite shrine showed no sign of abating.

The renewed bloodshed a day after a daytime curfew in the capital was lifted prompted President Bush to appeal again to Iraqis to exercise restraint and not allow their country to be pushed toward civil war.

"Obviously there are some who are trying to sow the seeds of sectarian violence," Bush said in Washington. "And now the people of Iraq and their leaders must make a choice. The choice is chaos or unity."

Most of the victims Tuesday were Shiites targeted by a series of five midday blasts in Shiite neighborhoods, including New Baghdad, where a man detonated his explosives vest at a crowded gas station, killing 23, and Karradah, where a car bomb killed six at a small market opposite a Shiite mosque.

But there also were more attacks against Sunni targets, including a bombing that damaged the Hussein al-Majid mosque in Tikrit where Saddam Hussein's father is buried.

An early-morning bombing damaged a Sunni mosque in the mixed Hurriyah neighborhood, reportedly killing three, and a car bomb exploded early in the evening at a Shiite mosque in the same neighborhood, killing at least 23 people.

Elsewhere Tuesday, two British soldiers were killed in Amarah, 180 miles south of Baghdad, the Defense Ministry reported in London. And an American soldier was killed by small-arms fire Monday west of Baghdad.

The tit-for-tat sectarian attacks have left hundreds of people dead nationwide since the Feb. 22 attack on the Askariya shrine in Samarra heightened fears that Iraq could be sliding toward full-scale civil war.

According to statistics released by Iraq's government, 379 people had been killed through 4 p.m. Tuesday, and an official at Baghdad's morgue said at least 248 of those were killed in the capital through Monday. The mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods there have witnessed the worst of the violence.

The reports contradicted a Washington Post report that about 1,300 people have been killed in the days of bloodletting that followed the bombing of the shrine in Samarra, about 60 miles north of the capital. A Cabinet statement said that "what was reported in a foreign newspaper were inaccurate and exaggerated numbers of victims." The Post said it got its number from the main Baghdad morgue.

Some of the victims have been Shiites killed in bombings and mortar attacks; others were Sunnis who were abducted by Shiite militias in a wave of retaliatory attacks against Sunni mosques.

In a further effort to quell the violence, Iraq's army deployed tanks in the streets of Baghdad for the first time since the fall of Saddam.

The tanks did not move into neighborhoods controlled by Iraq's Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry forces, which Sunnis complain have been infiltrated by Shiite militias.

An Iraqi army official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there had been "tensions" between Interior Ministry forces and the army when it sought to deploy tanks in the Dora neighborhood, an area that is supposed to be under Interior Ministry control.

Tensions also persisted among Iraq's political leaders, despite attempts to put on a show of unity in the wake of the sectarian fury. The biggest Sunni bloc in the new legislature elected in December still is boycotting talks on forming a new government. The Iraqi Accord Front says it will not go back to the negotiations until its demands for the return of Sunni mosques occupied by Shiites and for the ejection of Shiite militias from the Interior Ministry's security forces are met.

Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, strongly rebuked the "outgoing" Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who is the Shiite nominee to head the next government, for leaving the country on an official visit to Turkey without consulting the rest of the government.

Iraq "will not be bound by any agreements that Jaafari might enter into while visiting the Republic of Turkey," Talabani said in a statement, accusing al-Jaafari of "violating ... his commitment to operate on the basis of consensus" with his Kurdish coalition partners in the government.

Kurds have grown increasingly alarmed over the past year at al-Jaafari's warm relationship with their archrival, Turkey, which staunchly opposes Kurdish aspirations to independence in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq.

Kurds, Sunnis and secularists in the new legislature have thrown their support behind U.S. calls for the formation of a national unity government that would represent all factions on the basis of consensus, but the main Shiite coalition believes that as the largest bloc in parliament it has the right to decide who should be in the government.

But the United Iraqi Alliance lacks an overall majority and will not be able to form the next government unless it wins the support of the Kurds, leaving open the question of whether al-Jaafari can succeed in his bid to keep his job.

On a visit to Najaf, al-Jaafari's national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, appeared to win the endorsement of top Shiite religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for al-Jaafari's candidacy.

The United Iraqi Alliance "has chosen Jaafari and this is the official choice," al-Rubaie told reporters after meeting with Sistani at his home in Najaf.

Sistani wields immense influence over most ordinary Shiites, and in the past it has proved difficult for Iraqi Shiite political parties to challenge his will.

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(Nadeem Majeed in Baghdad and Hassan Jarrah in Najaf contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune.

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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