Baghdad, Iraq – Iraq’s most influential Shiite political leader called today for Sunni-Shiite unity and condemned all killings of Iraqis in a bid to pull the nation back from the brink of civil war after the bombing of a Shiite shrine and a wave of deadly reprisal attacks that left nearly 130 people dead.
The government, meanwhile, announced stepped-up security measures, including a ban on entering or leaving Baghdad and deployment of armed forces in tense areas.
Religious leaders summoned Iraq’s Shiites and Sunnis to joint prayer services amid an extraordinary daytime curfew aimed at halting attacks on Sunni mosques that followed the destruction the golden dome of the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra, a predominantly Sunni city about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad acknowledged the danger facing Iraq – and the U.S. strategy for disengaging from this country.
“Everything that needs to be done must be done to avoid a civil war, and I think they are keenly aware of the danger,” he said of Iraq’s leaders.
In a statement read over national television, top Shiite leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, condemned the killings of all Iraqis as well as reprisal attacks on Sunni or Shiite mosques. He said those who carried out the mosque bombing in Samarra “do not represent the Sunnis in Iraq.” Dhafer al-Ani, spokesman for the biggest Sunni Arab bloc in parliament, praised al-Hakim’s statement, calling it “a step on the road of healing the wounds.” But he said his Iraqi Accordance Front was still waiting for an apology from the government for failing to protect Sunni mosques from reprisal attacks, as well as a commitment to repair the damage and bring those responsible to justice.
The Sunni bloc Thursday suspended talks with the main Shiite alliance about forming a new government until its demands are met.
Al-Hakim blamed Saddam Hussein loyalists and followers of al-Qaida in Iraq boss Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for the mosque bombing.
“We all have to unite in order to eliminate them,” he said.
“This is what al-Zarqawi is working for, that is, to ignite a sectarian strife in the country,” he added. “We call for self-restraint.” Col. Jeffrey Snow, a U.S. Army brigade commander in Baghdad, said the pleas by Iraqi political and religious leaders were helping curb the escalation of sectarian violence.
“It appears as though the people have really listened to the government of Iraq as well as their religious leadership in terms of not allowing this to break down into violent acts,” Snow said.
Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, said he had deployed Iraqi armed forces in areas of friction and banned all vehicles from entering or leaving the capital other than police cars, ambulances and government trucks.
He also said measures had been taken to protect holy sites, ban the carrying of unauthorized weapons in the streets, and to rebuild the Shiite shrine in Samarra. A committee was appointed to establish responsibility for the “Samarra catastrophe,” he said.
But he did not mention Sunni mosques damaged in reprisal attacks.
Khalilzad was optimistic Sunnis would return to the talks on forming a government. Without the establishment of an inclusive government, the U.S. strategy for disengagement from Iraq will collapse.
“Iraqis do not have a better alternative than to form a government of national unity,” he told reporters at a news conference. “I think this attack has had a major impact here, getting everyone’s attention that Iraq is in danger … that they must lead and compromise with each other to bring the people of Iraq together and to save this country.” The curfew in Baghdad and three nearby provinces appeared to have blunted the surge in violence. Still, Iraqis fear the violence which followed the Samarra attack had pushed the country closer to civil war than at any time since the U.S.-led invasion nearly three years ago.
Several joint Sunni-Shiite prayer services were announced for today, including one at the Askariya shrine. But security forces turned away about 700 people, virtually all of them Sunnis, who showed up for the service.
Late Thursday, Iraqi state television announced an extension of the nighttime curfew until 4 p.m. today in Baghdad and the nearby provinces of Diyala, Babil and Salaheddin, where the shrine bombing took place. But security forces permitted worshippers to walk to mosque for midday prayers.
A large crowd attended today prayers at Baghdad’s Abu Hanifa mosque, Baghdad’s most important Sunni site, where Imam Ahmed Hasan al-Taha denounced the shrine attack as a conspiracy intended to draw Iraqis into sectarian strife.
There was also little sign of the curfew in Baghdad’s teeming Shiite slum, Sadr City, where armed militiamen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have been out in force since Wednesday’s mosque attack. Iraqi police found six bodies handcuffed and shot near a parking lot in the area, the Interior Ministry said.
In the southern Shiite heartland, more than 10,000 people converged on Basra’s al-Adillah mosque, where a representative of Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called another joint service with Sunnis.
The extraordinary security measures helped curb – but not eliminate – the violence.
In Samarra, a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed two officers 10 minutes after the daytime curfew expired. The patrol opened fire after the attack, injuring a man and his wife who were driving past. Another explosion set fire to an oil pipeline south of the city, police said.
In Basra, where the curfew was not in effect, gunmen today kidnapped three children of a Shiite legislator from near the family home, police said. They were freed hours later in a raid that also netted a suspect, police Cap. Mushtaq Khazim said.
Al-Jbouri is a member of the Islamic Dawa Party-Iraq Organization and is the former head of Basra’s provincial council.
Elsewhere, police found the bodies of two bodyguards for the Basra head of the Sunni Endowment, a government body that cares for Sunni mosques and shrines. They had been shot.
South of the capital, in the religiously mixed area known as the “Triangle of Death,” gunmen burst into a Shiite home in Latifiyah, separated men from women, and killed five of the males, police Capt. Ibrahim Abdullah said.
