Iraqi Shiites Are Urged to Defy Militants’ Aims

A day after the release of a memo attributed to Al Qaeda in Iraq that described plans for a violent campaign to displace Shiite Muslims from many parts of the country, one of the sect’s most influential religious leaders used his Friday sermon to urge the faithful to hold their ground.

“I demand first the government and second the brothers to keep their places,” said Sheik Jalaluddin Saghir, leader of the capital’s largest and most influential Shiite house of worship, the Bratha Mosque.

“We should not let the terrorists do that,” Saghir said, referring to a strategy memo that the U.S. military said it had found at an Al Qaeda in Iraq hide-out in Yousifiya, south of Baghdad. “We should help families in finding a way to stay in their places.”

Although the memo could not be independently authenticated, it echoed earlier instructions attributed to insurgent leaders, who are fighting coalition forces and trying to prevent the establishment of a stable central government.

The memo called on insurgents to “displace the Shiites and displace their shops and businesses from our areas.”

The memo said Baghdad should be an area of focus for the attacks. It told insurgents to cast a broad net, urging the expulsion of “black market sellers of gas, bread or meat” and the “cleansing” of areas of “any person suspected of spying against us.”

The outspoken Saghir, a member of parliament who distributes DVDs of his Friday sermons, blamed Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab Zarqawi for such extreme sentiments. He called the insurgent leader “an exceptional criminal who hurts all Iraqis.”

His words came a day after the U.S. military attempted to discredit Zarqawi by showing footage of him apparently struggling to fire a machine gun and looking less than gallant in a dark sweatsuit and white running shoes.

Centuries-old tensions between Shiites and Sunnis have been at the root of much of the violence that has ripped apart Iraq since the U.S.-led military coalition toppled dictator Saddam Hussein three years ago.

Iraqis have endured the bulk of the violence, but American forces have suffered at least 2,414 deaths since the invasion in March 2003, according to an Associated Press tally. The total includes three U.S. soldiers killed Friday when a roadside bomb ripped into their armored vehicle south of Baghdad.

It was the second such deadly attack on U.S. forces in as many days; a bomb set off Thursday in Baghdad killed two soldiers.

The Friday bombing occurred in the late morning along the highway connecting Baghdad with Babil province, about 60 miles to the south. Iraqi security forces said at least two Americans were injured in the Humvee, which caught fire after the explosion.

Elsewhere, American troops came under attack on the outskirts of Fallouja and in Samarra. Returning fire, they killed at least five Iraqis and injured several others, Iraqi security officials said.

As violence appeared to rise, Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad reported receiving 13 bodies. Six were those of shop owners in the western part of the city, three of them brothers, who were shot and their businesses burned. Two others killed were a father and son, who had been kidnapped. At least three others, from the Dora neighborhood in south Baghdad, showed signs of torture.

Shiite militias and loyalists of Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Baath Party have been blamed for much of the violence, but one Iraqi leader attempted to spread the blame even more widely.

Interim Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who has been accused of allowing security forces under his command to carry out sectarian attacks, suggested that private security workers operating outside the control of the government might be at the root of the attacks.

Speaking on Al Arabiya television late Thursday, Jabr said the security companies and their estimated 200,000 employees were an unchecked source of firepower in a nation bristling with antagonism and weapons.

“These forces are outside the control of the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense,” Jabr said, adding that he hoped to bring such companies to heel. He called “eventually for the disappearance of such companies.”

At other mosques Friday, meanwhile, religious leaders from both sides of the Shiite-Sunni divide called for an end to retaliation killings.

Imam Sadruddin Qubanchi, who led prayers at the Imam Ali Mosque in the city of Najaf, suggested that militias had to cease their activities.

“No country can be unified and strong when there are in it a number of militias struggling for influence,” said Qubanchi, who is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the top Shiite religious leader in the country.

He also opposed a solution, proposed this week by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), to divide Iraq into autonomous Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish homelands. “The Iraqi will, the constitution and the government are against fragmentation,” Qubanchi said.

At Abu Hanifa, a well-known Sunni mosque in Baghdad, Sheik Ali Zand urged worshipers to “stay away from disarray and keep our wisdom.” He called the continued shootings “an act lacking wisdom, because the loss from such an act may be a human soul that God will question you about.”

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Times staff writer Caesar Ahmed in Baghdad and special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf contributed to this report.