Iraq sectarian violence kills 130

ITs going good i see...Any1 want to say civil war besides me.......We need a Civil war here in America as well, but let our rage be towards the government not the republican sheople....

Iraq sectarian violence kills 130 By Lin Noueihed and Alastair Macdonald
32 minutes ago

Sectarian violence killed more than 130 people across Iraq and left dozens of mosques damaged or in ruins as the United States appealed on Thursday to Sunnis and Shi'ites to step back from the brink of civil war.

Dozens of bloody revenge attacks caused the death toll after Wednesday's suspected al Qaeda bombing of one of the holiest shrines in Shi'ite Islam.

President George W. Bush stepped into the worst crisis since the U.S. invasion, one that threatens efforts to form a stable, unity government and bring U.S. troops home from Iraq.

"The voices of reason from all aspects of Iraqi life understand that this bombing is intended to create civil strife," Bush said as the military reported seven more U.S. soldiers had been killed in two separate attacks on Wednesday.

Bush praised Iraqi leaders' public efforts to maintain calm.

The U.N. envoy also stepped in, asking Iraqi leaders to join him in a meeting. "I have invited political, religious and civil leaders to discuss confidence-building measures to ensure the situation remains under control," Ashraf Qazi told Reuters.

But the main Sunni political group said it pulled out of U.S.-backed talks on forming a coalition after December's parliamentary election and leading clerics traded unusually frank sectarian criticisms that may do little to calm passions.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, pressed ahead despite the Sunni boycott with a meeting that he had called to avert a descent toward a civil war. After discussions with Shi'ites, Kurds and leaders of a smaller Sunni group, he told a televised news conference that if all-out war came "no one will be safe."

Among the dead were 47 people, apparently both Sunnis and Shi'ites, whom gunmen dragged from vehicles after they attended a demonstration to show cross-sectarian solidarity near Baghdad.

IRAQIS STAY AT HOME

Many of the 27 million Iraqis stayed at home amid a security clampdown and three days of mourning for the destruction of the Shi'ites' cherished Golden Mosque in Samarra on Wednesday.

"I stayed home," Nasser Ahmed, a Sunni shopkeeper, said in Baghdad. "I was expecting mass killings in the streets."

The next few days, starting with Friday when millions will go to their respective mosques, may be crucial to determining whether rhetoric from Shi'ite government leaders and clerics can restrain militiamen from rival Shi'ite factions, jostling for power, from an onslaught against once dominant minority Sunnis.

Though bloodless, the bombing of the Samarra shrine has sparked greater fury than countless Sunni rebel attacks that have killed thousands of Shi'ites since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime three years ago.

Some 130,000 U.S. troops, with smaller numbers of British and other allies, were standing by as the largely untried, U.S. -trained Iraqi army and police went on the highest alert, with all leave canceled; the heavily armed Americans may have to intervene if large-scale violence increases, however.

"The issue hangs on the next few days. Either the gates of hell open onto a civil war or the Shi'ites will take more power with the excuse that Sunni leaders are unable to rein in increasing terrorist activity," said Hazim al-Naimi, a political science professor at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University.

"Only the U.S. military is preventing war in some areas."

SUNNI MOSQUES ATTACKED

The main Sunni religious group said 184 Sunni mosques had been damaged, some destroyed; 10 clerics had been killed and 15 abducted, the Muslim Clerics Association said, accusing Shi'ite religious leaders of stoking the anger by calling for protests.

The direct criticism of the Shi'ites' revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, widely seen as a force for restraint, was unusual and prompted criticism in return from one of Sistani's fellow religious authorities.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is visiting the Middle East, urged Iraqis to pull together and not be pushed into sectarian strife by a bloodless but highly symbolic attack blamed on al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"The only people that want a civil war in Iraq are the terrorists like Zarqawi," she told reporters.

An Internet statement from the Mujahideen Council, which includes al Qaeda in Iraq, blamed Shi'ite leaders for blowing up the shrine to justify attacks and vowed a "shocking response."

Underlining the broader resonance of events in Iraq, where Bush hopes a friendly democracy in the oil-rich nation can be an example to the whole Middle East, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pinned the blame for the shrine bombing on Israelis and Americans and warned they would face the wrath of Muslims.

Shi'ite, non-Arab Iran, in dispute with Washington over its nuclear research program, is close to the majority Shi'ites now in power in Baghdad, setting the new Iraqi government at odds with many fellow Arabs, most of whom are Sunni Muslims.

In other violence, a bomb blasted an Iraqi army foot patrol in a market in the religiously divided city of Baquba, killing 16 people. Three journalists for Al Arabiya television were found shot dead after being attacked while filming in Samarra.

(Additional reporting by Michael Georgy, Lin Noueihed, Ahmed Rasheed, Aseel Kami, Waleed Ibrahim, Faris al-Mehdawi, Nick Olivari, Lutfi Abu Oun and Salem al-Oreibi in Baghdad and Abdelrazzak Hameed in Basra)
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