Sectarian Violence Sweeps Iraq

Iraqi officials ordered a daytime curfew in Baghdad and nearby provinces today as the death toll climbed past 100 in two days of sectarian attacks that began after the bombing of one of Shiite Islam’s holiest sites.

In the bloodiest incident Thursday, gunmen shot dead 47 people at a fake checkpoint north of Baghdad and left their bodies in a ditch.

The escalating violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims has convulsed the nation and raised fears of civil war. The unusual curfew was aimed at keeping people away from Friday prayer services in areas with mixed Shiite-Sunni populations. With religious passions inflamed, officials worried that the weekly sermons could provoke new clashes.

The curfew, which is set to expire at 4 p.m., covers Baghdad and nearby Salahuddin, Diyala and Babil provinces.

Meanwhile, the largest Sunni political bloc pulled out of delicate talks over the shape of Iraq’s new government, pushing a faltering process to the edge of collapse. Sunni leaders were furious because dozens of their sect’s mosques had come under attack in retribution for Wednesday’s bombing of the Shiites’ Golden Mosque in Samarra, about 60 miles north of the capital.

“No matter how much the [religious leadership] or the government will attempt to control the situation, it will stay as a negative milestone in Iraq,” said Jaber Habeeb, a member of the recently elected parliament. “Things may be chaotic.”

The waves of vengeance have left the majority Shiite and the minority Sunni communities feeling victimized and deeply angry with each other. Both are also resentful of the United States, which has been working to ease the animosity and coax Iraq’s various ethnic and religious groups into a cooperative government.

“The Americans also abandoned us extremely. They could have put some of their vehicles to protect the mosques -- they have the forces to do that,” Khalaf Ulayyan, general secretary of the Sunni Iraqi National Dialogue Council, said at a news conference. “How does a civil war start? It starts like this.”

Tensions have been high between the two sects since the Shiites, who were repressed under Saddam Hussein, took the dominant role in the government. Sunnis, who now feel marginalized, have helped fuel the insurgency.

As many Iraqis stayed behind closed doors Thursday, a ghostly quiet gripped the capital. Streets were drained of traffic, shops were shuttered, mosques stood empty and locked tight. Iraqi police checkpoints choked off passage between Baghdad’s neighborhoods, and a strict nighttime curfew was in place as officials wrangled over where to deploy security forces.

“If the opponent keeps on harming the Shiites, there will be an unavoidable civil war,” said Saeed Abbas Almusawi, a 45-year-old Shiite sheep vendor in the southern city of Basra. “It is true that there will be no winner, but ... whoever dies defending his religion and shrines is a martyr.”

President Bush on Thursday called the mosque bombing an “evil act” and said he thought it was “intended to create civil strife.” He said the U.S. government would stand “side by side with the government in making sure that beautiful dome is restored.”

U.S. troops, meanwhile, remained largely in the background, with military officials saying Iraqi security forces were capable of quelling the unrest.

“We’re seeing a confident, capable Iraqi government using their capable Iraqi security forces to calm the storm that was inflamed by a horrendous, horrific terrorist attack yesterday against the Golden Mosque in Samarra,” Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters at a briefing in Baghdad.

Most of the dozens of people who were pulled from their cars and executed by insurgents at the phony checkpoint outside Baqubah were Shiites, a local tribal chief said. They were heading home from one of the many demonstrations that erupted across Iraq as Shiites mourned their shrine.

Dhari Thuaaban Salim, the chief of a Shiite tribe and head of the local governing council, said his phone began to ring Thursday morning with word that gunmen had set up a checkpoint to snare victims. He drove to the intersection with his armed guards and found about 10 burned cars and a ditch littered with bodies.

“I counted 47 corpses shot in a mass way in a ditch,” he said in a telephone interview. “They were inhabitants of the region and its outskirts.”

With Sunni mosques burning and protesters clogging the streets, President Jalal Talabani called political leaders to his home for emergency talks. Officials were focused on repairing Sunni as well as Shiite houses of worship as a gesture of interreligious cooperation, and on figuring out how best to deploy forces to get a handle on the unrest.

But the Sunni leadership boycotted the meetings to protest the retaliatory attacks by Shiites. Ulayyan called on neighboring countries to send troops to protect Iraq’s Sunnis from the Shiites and Americans.

A Western diplomat familiar with the negotiations at Talabani’s home said some Sunni politicians had relented later in the day and met with Shiite and Kurdish leaders.

There is “a deeper and scarier sense on both sides of the consequences of their actions,” the diplomat said. “Each [sect] described themselves as looking into an abyss they hadn’t contemplated before.”

Still, the public stance of the Sunnis remained fiery. A rare flash of animosity also flared between the country’s preachers as Sunni clerics accused their Shiite counterparts of encouraging the violence.

“We are astonished by the attacks on our mosques, barbarian attacks committed without any purpose,” said a statement from the Sunni Waqf, Iraq’s main Sunni religious foundation. “They burned our mosques, our Korans and killed and injured some of our imams.”

The hard-line Sunni Muslim Scholars Assn. said that 168 mosques had been damaged and that 10 clerics had been killed and 10 arrested during the two days of protests. The group blamed Shiite clerics for the unrest, saying religious leaders had called for demonstrations even though they couldn’t control what happened in the streets.

The swipe at the imams appeared to be a rare, indirect attack on powerful Shiite religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and it stood out as another measure of the deepening rift.

Hours after the attack on the Golden Mosque, a statement from Sistani’s office urged caution -- but also implied that Shiites were entitled to form militias because Iraqi forces were too weak to protect places of worship. On Thursday, Sistani, who has served as a voice of reason since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Hussein, was quiet.

Reports of carnage came in from around the country: Thirteen bodies were found blindfolded, handcuffed and shot execution-style in and around the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold. A Sunni family of seven was kidnapped in the morning from their home in the volatile, mixed-sect neighborhood of Dora; an hour later, their bodies were found in the street.

Demonstrations were staged in most areas that have a significant Shiite presence. In Sadr City, hundreds of protesters surged through the streets waving swords, guns and pictures of clerics. Some carried signs dubbing Sunni politicians “political terrorists” and calling for their death.

In restive, predominantly Sunni Fallouja, calls for selfrestraint rained down from the loudspeakers of the mosques.

In the Baghdad bureau of Al Arabiya satellite TV, mourners sat weeping over the death of Atwar Bahjat, a popular, 30-year-old Iraqi correspondent for the channel. A native of Samarra, she had returned to her hometown Wednesday to report on the attack.

After appearing on air, she was kidnapped with cameraman Adnan Abdullah and soundman Khalid Muhsen. Their bodies were found hours later, dumped by the side of a road.

Bahjat, the daughter of a Sunni father and a Shiite mother, had recently finished writing a book based on her experiences covering the invasion of the city of Najaf. A former reporter for Al Jazeera satellite TV, she had fled Iraq last year to escape death threats. But she couldn’t stay away, her aunt said, and a few months ago came back.

“She said, ‘I only have one life to live, I’ll stay and die in Iraq,’ ” said the aunt, Fatat Abdul Karim.

In Samarra, residents flocked to the shrine with shovels and pickup trucks. The blast sliced the top of the dome away, leaving a mound of chewed debris and a tangle of beams where the golden roof once gleamed in the desert sun. Four tons of explosives were used, officials in Samarra said.

Unidentified gunmen stormed the mosque, overpowered the guards, and set off the explosives. There has been no claim of responsibility.

“I am afraid that ignorant people from both sides, with the instigation of the politicians, may drag the country into the oven of sectarian strife,” said Ahmed Saleh, a 31-year-old food store clerk in Samarra. “If it is not dealt with wisely, the country will be dragged into a bottomless pit. If it starts, God forbid, then even the neighboring countries will be destroyed.”

Reverberations continued to rattle the region, particularly in nations where tensions between Sunnis and Shiites have already been stoked by the fighting in Iraq. In Lebanon, tens of thousands of Shiite demonstrators massed in the streets, chanting anti-U.S. slogans.

The United States also came in for criticism in Iran, where hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the mosque bombing on America and Israel.

“These heinous acts are committed by a group of Zionists and occupiers that have failed. They have failed in the face of Islam’s logic and justice,” Ahmadinejad said. “But be sure, you will not be saved from the wrath and power of the justice-seeking nations by resorting to such acts.”

Times staff writers Raheem Salman, Caesar Ahmed, Shamil Aziz and Zainab Hussein in Baghdad and special correspondents in Samarra, Basra and Baqubah contributed to this report.