Quoted: • Grand Ayatollah Sistani ceases calls for calm, no longer takes a lead role in brokering peace.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani is the man keeping a lid on this, if he gives the nod the streets will run with blood.

ANdy

Update 23: Civil War Looms With 68 Killed in Baghdad
By STEVEN R. HURST , 02.28.2006, 04:56 PM


Sunnis and Shiites traded bombings and mortar fire against mainly religious targets in Baghdad well into the night Tuesday, killing at least 68 people a day after authorities lifted a curfew that had briefly calmed a series of sectarian reprisal attacks.

At least six of Tuesday's attacks hit clearly religious targets, concluding with a car bombing after sundown at the Shiite Abdel Hadi Chalabi mosque in the Hurriyah neighborhood that killed 23 and wounded 55. A separate suicide bombing killed 23 people at an east Baghdad gas station, where people had lined up to buy kerosine.

In addition to those known to have been killed Tuesday, police found nine more bullet-riddled bodies, including a Sunni Muslim tribal sheik, off a road southeast of Baghdad. It was unclear when they died.

The surge of violence deepened the trauma of residents already shaken by fears the country was teetering on the brink of sectarian civil war, threatened talks among Iraqi politicians struggling to form a government and raised questions about U.S. plans to begin drawing down troop strength this summer.

Iraq began to tilt seriously toward outright civil war after the Feb. 22 bombing of the important Shiite Askariya shrine in the mainly Sunni city of Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad.

President Bush decried the latest surge in sectarian violence Tuesday and said that for Iraqis "the choice is chaos or unity."

In congressional testimony, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said a civil war in Iraq could lead to a broader conflict in the Middle East, pitting the region's Sunni and Shiite powers against one another.

Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Maples said the sectarian violence stems from a core of Sunni Arab insurgents who can exploit "social, economic, historical and religious grievances."

"Networks based on these relationships remain the greatest threat to long-term stability in Iraq," Maples said.

The sectarian violence has hit Baghdad hardest because the population in the capital is about evenly divided between Shiites and Sunnis, more so than in any other region of the country.

At about the same time as the attack on the Shiite Abdel Hadi Chalabi mosque, a mortar round landed near the Shiite Imam Kadhim shrine in the Kazimiyah neighborhood on the opposite side of the Tigris River, killing one and wounding 10.

Those attacks appeared to have been in retaliation for assaults on Sunni places of worship earlier in the day.

North of Baghdad, a blast badly damaged a Sunni mosque where the father of Saddam Hussein was buried in the family's ancestral hometown, Tikrit. The Iraqi Islamic Party reported a bomb hit the Sunni Thou Nitaqain mosque in the Hurriyah neighborhood at 8 a.m. Tuesday, killing three and wounding 11. Gunmen in two speeding cars opened fire on the Sunni al-Salam mosque in the western Baghdad's Mansour district, killing a guard.

Late Tuesday police reported finding the body of Shiite cleric Hani Hadi handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head near a Sunni mosque in Baghdad's notorious Dora neighborhood.

One of the day's bloodiest attacks came when a suicide bomber detonated an explosives vest packed with ball bearings among people lined up to buy kerosine at a crowded filling station in east Baghdad. The blast killed 23 people and wounded 51, leaving behind the charred and twisted remains of wheeled carts that customers had used to transport fuel canisters to the station.

A car bombing in the same neighborhood targeted a police patrol and killed five people and wounded 17 - all civilians.

Another car bomb hit a small market opposite the Shiite Timimi mosque in the mostly Shiite Karradah neighborhood, killing six people and wounding 16.

Separately and in an unusual move, the government issued a statement declaring that 379 people had been killed and 458 wounded as of 4 p.m. Tuesday in the sectarian violence tied to the Askariya bombing.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that more than 1,300 people were killed in the reprisal attacks. The Cabinet statement, however, said "what was reported in a foreign newspaper were inaccurate and exaggerated numbers of victims."

More than 60 relatives of the dead - many of them women dressed in black and beating their breasts as they wailed in grief - assembled with empty coffins at the morgue to take away their dead family members. One young man, who refused to give his name, told an AP reporter that his three brothers had gone out to buy bread Saturday night and were gunned down in a drive-by attack.

National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie, meanwhile, traveled to the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Tuesday to meet with Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the Shiite community's most revered spiritual leader. Al-Rubaie emerged to tell reporters "the way to forming the government is difficult and planted with political bombs. We ask the Iraqi people to be patient, and we expect forming the government will take a few months."

In the south Tuesday, two British soldiers were killed in Amarah, 180 miles from Baghdad, the Defense Ministry reported in London, but gave no other details. A witness said a car bomb targeted a British patrol and helicopters were seen taking away casualties.

The U.S. military reported a U.S. soldier was killed by small-arms fire west of Baghdad on Monday. No details were provided. The death brought to at least 2,292 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an AP count. The figure includes seven military civilians.

In other violence Tuesday, a roadside bomb targeting the convoy of a defense ministry adviser killed five soldiers and injured seven others in the east Baghdad. The adviser, Lt. Gen. Daham Radhi al-Assal, escaped unharmed.


Associated Press Writer Sinan Salaheddin and Alexandra Zavis contributed to this report from Baghdad


http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/02/28/ap2559659.html

Toll in Iraq's Deadly Surge: 1,300

Morgue Count Eclipses Other Tallies Since Shrine Attack

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 28, 2006; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Feb. 27 -- Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

An Iraqi man weeps after his brother was killed in a mortar attack in Baghdad. Several such attacks were reported, but for the most part, violence appeared to have eased in the capital, where a round-the-clock curfew was lifted. (By Ali Jasim -- Reuters)

"After he came back from the evening prayer, the Mahdi Army broke into his house and asked him, 'Are you Khalid the Sunni infidel?' " one man at the morgue said, relating what were the last hours of his cousin, according to other relatives. "He replied yes and then they took him away."

Aides to Sadr denied the allegations, calling them part of a smear campaign by unspecified political rivals.

By Monday, violence between Sunni Arabs and Shiites appeared to have eased. As Iraqi security forces patrolled, American troops offered measured support, in hopes of allowing the Iraqis to take charge and prevent further carnage.

But at the morgue, where the floor was crusted with dried blood, the evidence of the damage already done was clear. Iraqis arrived throughout the day, seeking family members and neighbors among the contorted bodies.

"And they say there is no sectarian war?" demanded one man. "What do you call this?"

The brothers of one missing man arrived, searching for a body. Their hunt ended on the concrete floor, provoking sobs of mourning: "Why did you kill him?" "He was unarmed!" "Oh, my brother! Oh, my brother!"

Morgue officials said they had logged more than 1,300 dead since Wednesday -- the day the Shiites' gold-domed Askariya shrine was bombed -- photographing, numbering and tagging the bodies as they came in over the nights and days of retaliatory raids.

The Statistics Department of the Iraqi police put the nationwide toll at 1,020 since Wednesday, but that figure was based on paperwork that is sometimes delayed before reaching police headquarters. The majority of the dead had been killed after being taken away by armed men, police said.

The disclosure of the death tolls followed accusations by the U.S. military and later Iraqi officials that the news media had exaggerated the violence between Shiites and Sunnis over the past few days.

The bulk of the previously known deaths were caused by bombings and other large-scale attacks. But the scene at the morgue and accounts related by relatives indicated that most of the bloodletting came at the hands of self-styled executioners.

"They killed him just because he was a Sunni," one young man at the morgue said of his 32-year-old neighbor, whose body he was retrieving.

Much of the violence has centered on mosques, many of which were taken over by Shiite gunmen, bombed or burned.

An Iraqi man weeps after his brother was killed in a mortar attack in Baghdad. Several such attacks were reported, but for the most part, violence appeared to have eased in the capital, where a round-the-clock curfew was lifted. (By Ali Jasim -- Reuters)

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, aides to Sadr denied any role in the killings.

"These groups wore black clothes like the Mahdi Army to make the people say that the Shiites kidnapped and killed them," said Riyadh al-Nouri, a close aide to Sadr.

Sahib al-Amiri, another close aide, said: "Some political party accused [Sadr's political party] and the Mahdi Army because they considered us as competitive to them. So they recruited criminals to kill Shiites and Sunnis."

After Wednesday's mosque attack in Samarra, Sadr and other Shiite clerics called on their armed followers to deploy to protect shrines across Iraq.

Clutching rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles, the militias rolled out of their Baghdad base of Sadr City. Residents of several neighborhoods reported them on patrol or in control of mosques. U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces did not appear to challenge the militias, which are officially outlawed.

Sunni leaders charged that more than 100 Sunni mosques were burned, fired upon or bombed in the retaliatory violence after the attack on the Samarra mosque.

Iraqi officials, at the urging of Sunni leaders, imposed what became a round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad to try to quell the violence.

Sunnis speaking at the morgue said many of the dead had been taken away at night, when security forces were supposed to have been enforcing the curfew.

By Monday, the reported violence had subsided. Four mortar rounds hit a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, killing four people, news agencies reported. More mortar attacks boomed in other parts of the capital.

Also Monday, Iraq's interim government lifted the round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad. The new curfew orders residents inside from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Residents rushed out of their homes to refill gas tanks and kitchen shelves. Lines at gas stations stretched for miles and sometimes clogged both sides of highways. One motorist in the line was seen clutching a blanket and pillow, apparently anticipating an overnight wait for gas.

Making their way through the traffic were a few cars with plastic-wrapped corpses in crude wooden coffins strapped to the roofs.

During two hours at the morgue on Monday, families brought in two more victims of the violence to receive death certificates. Other families carried away 10 dead. Most of the victims were Sunni.

At the blue steel doors of the morgue, dozens more bloody bodies could be seen on the floor or on gurneys. Two hundred were still unidentified and unclaimed, morgue workers said.

Claiming the dead has become automated. Morgue workers directed families to a barred window in the narrow courtyard outside the main entrance. A computer screen angled to face the window flashed the contorted, staring faces of the dead: men shot in the mouth, men shot in the head, men covered with blood, men with bindings twisted around their necks.

Men and a few women in black abayas pressed up to the window's black bars as the reek of the bodies inside spilled out.

"What neighborhood?'' a morgue worker asked one waiting man.

"Adhamiyah,'' the man said, naming a predominantly Sunni neighborhood.

Tapping at the keyboard, the morgue worker fast-forwarded through the scores of tortured faces.

"Criminals. How can you kill another human for nothing?" someone clutching the bars asked.

"Good news, we found the body," another man called out. "We found him."

Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf, staff writer Nelson Hernandez and other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/27/AR2006022701128_2.html?nav=rss_print/asection

Fresh bombings shake Iraq capital

At least 60 people were killed in yesterday's violence
At least 23 people have been killed in a fresh wave of bomb attacks in the Iraqi capital, amid warnings the country is on the brink of civil war.
The worst death toll was in a blast near a security checkpoint that killed at least 20 people and wounded 40.

Sectarian slaughter was triggered last week by the destruction of an important Shia shrine in the city of Samarra.

A US military intelligence chief has warned that further violence could have a "significant impact" on the country.

"We're in a very tenuous situation right now I believe," Lieut Gen Michael Myers told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington.

"I think that more violence, were it to occur, were it to be stimulated by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, would have a very significant impact on the situation in Iraq," he said.

Repeat attack

On Tuesday at least 60 people were killed in a surge of bomb attacks a day after the authorities lifted a daytime curfew that had been imposed to stem the killing.

As relatives of those killed arrived at the city mortuary to collect their bodies for burial, there were at least three further explosions across Baghdad.

The bloody attack on a checkpoint in the eastern Jadida district - a mainly Shia neighbourhood - was a few hundred meters (yards) from the scene of one of Tuesday's bombings.

Within an hour, a car bomb near Baghdad's central bus station killed at least three people. It was apparently timed to hit a police patrol, although the casualties were civilians. A third bomb also exploded in the east of the city, but without causing any casualties.

Meanwhile south of Baghdad, three civilians died when mortar rounds slammed into houses, police said.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4761940.stm

Iraq Bans Vehicles After Latest Violence

Thursday March 2, 2006 7:46 PM


AP Photo BAG110

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA

Associated Press Writers

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A bomb ripped through a vegetable market in a Shiite section of Baghdad and a leading Sunni politician escaped an attack on his convoy Thursday as at least 36 people were killed in unrelenting violence pushing Iraq toward civil war.

The Iraqi government announced a one-day ban on private vehicles in Baghdad and its outskirts aimed at averting attacks on Friday, when Muslims attend the most important prayer service of the week.

The ban will take effect when the overnight curfew ends at 6 a.m. Friday and will last until 4 p.m., according to a statement issued by the prime minister's office. Police and army were instructed to seal off the capital and seize any private vehicles that defy the ban.