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Mideast Leaders Say They Fear Violence May Go beyond Iraq    [

    Curfew Fails to Halt Iraq Killing
    BBC News

    Saturday 25 February 2006

At least a dozen people were killed in Baquba. (Photo: AFP)

    At least 36 people have died in violence across Iraq as the authorities fight to contain sectarian killing in which at least 165 have died this week.

    The bodies of 14 Iraqi commandos were recovered in south Baghdad following a gun battle with Shia militiamen.

    At least two people were killed as the funeral of a TV journalist was attacked in Baghdad. And a car bomb in the Shia shrine city of Karbala killed eight.

    A curfew has been extended in Baghdad to try to quell the violence.

    Iraq has been struggling to contain a wave of sectarian attacks since Wednesday.

    In other developments:

• At least a dozen members of a Shia family are gunned down in Baquba, north of Baghdad, officials say.
  
  
• The number of Iraqi battalions able to fight the insurgency with no US help falls from one to zero, the US military tells Congress - but the number able to fight with some US assistance rises substantially.
  
  
• The main Sunni political party says it might consider returning to talks on forming a new government, from which it withdrew earlier in the week.

    Civil War Fear

    This week's violence - which has led to fears that Iraq may descend into civil war - was sparked by the bombing of one of the country's holiest Shia sites, the al-Askari shrine in the city of Samarra.

    Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has vowed the government will rebuild the Shia shrine and Sunni holy sites attacked in revenge for the al-Askari bombing.

    The Iraqi government has now extended until Monday morning a ban on cars in Baghdad.

    The authorities had earlier renewed a curfew covering Baghdad and the provinces of Diyala, Babil and Salahuddine from Friday evening to 1600 (1300 GMT) on Saturday.

    Prime Minister Jaafari announced a ban on demonstrations and a clampdown on the carrying of weapons in public.

Bahjat and her crew were attacked and killed while reporting. (Photo: AFP)

    But despite the measures, violence broke out on Saturday at the funeral of Atwar Bahjat, a prominent Iraqi journalist.

    The funeral procession came under fire as it was approaching the cemetery, and then was bombed as it returned after the burial.

    At least two people are reported to have died in the blast, and five more were injured, some seriously.

    Ms. Bahjat and two crew members from al-Arabiya TV were killed in the wake of the attack on the al-Askari shrine.

    In Karbala, a predominantly Shia market city which is not under curfew, at least eight were killed and 30 injured in a car bombing.

    Plea for Calm

    US President George W Bush has urged restraint, saying: "This is a moment of choosing for the Iraqi people."

    The BBC's Jon Brain in Baghdad says the centre of Baghdad has been calm, with the streets virtually empty for a second day and no newspapers published.

    Few Iraqis went out on Friday, except to travel by foot to nearby mosques for weekly prayers.

    Shia and Sunni Muslim leaders in Iraq and abroad used Friday prayers to issue appeals for restraint and unity.

    Iraq's most influential Shia political leader, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, said the bombers who attacked the shrine in Samarra "do not represent Sunnis in Iraq."

    The theme was echoed in sermons in the Iraqi Shia heartland of the south.

    Followers of radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr attended his sermon in the Sadr City district, hearing him urge restraint.

    "We are not enemies but brothers," he told them. "Anyone who attacks a Muslim is not a Muslim."

 

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    Go to Original

    Mideast Leaders Say They Fear Violence May Go beyond Iraq
    By Joel Brinkley
    The New York Times

    Friday 24 February 2006

    Shannon, Ireland - As violence spread across Iraq during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to the Middle East this week, kings, presidents and prime ministers told her they were concerned that sectarian violence could spread across the Middle East.

    "It came up pretty much everywhere," said a senior State Department official traveling with Ms. Rice.

    Officials traveling with her said Ms. Rice told the Middle East leaders that she believed the violence would come to an end in time, and Iraq would eventually get back to the business of forming what she calls a "national unity government." The officials declined to be identified because they wanted to leave the on-the-record statements to Ms. Rice.

    Speaking on her plane as she returned to Washington today, Ms. Rice discussed the fears expressed to her.

    "I do think there is concern that the sectarian tensions that outsiders are stoking in Iraq, that the same outsiders might try to stoke sectarian tensions in other parts of the region," she said.

    During this trip, Ms. Rice met with national leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and the other Persian Gulf states. Neither Ms. Rice nor her aides would specifically describe their conversations with the Arab leaders.

    But Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, openly worried about a moment like this during remarks in Washington last fall. Speaking to reporters at the Saudi Embassy, he said he had been telling Bush administration officials that "the main worry of all the neighbors" of Iraq's was that the disintegration of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would "bring other countries in the region into the conflict."

    Insurgents blew up the Shiite mosque in Samara on Wednesday, the day Ms. Rice visited Riyadh, where she held a news conference with Prince Saud. The violence had not yet spread across Iraq.

    "We are looking forward, with the coming Iraqi government, that they will manage to stop such criminal actions and to achieve security and stability," he said then.

    But Saudi Arabia, where suicide bombers tried to blow up an oil center today, is already battling a deadly insurgency, which started in 2003. Saudi officials and many Saudi citizens believe the insurgency sprouted as a direct result of the Iraq war. Dissidents, the Saudis say, were so angry that their government allowed the invasion of Iraq to take place that they took to arms.

    One of the senior officials traveling with Ms. Rice said the Arab leaders, in their conversations with her, were particularly concerned that "outsiders could stir up trouble in Lebanon and perhaps the Palestinian territories."

    Ms. Rice did not say that. She said the Arab leaders told her that they were doing what they could to avert civil violence at home.

    "They are very committed not to let that happen," she said, "both working across lines in their own countries and also urging Iraqis to work across lines." Another senior official traveling with her noted that the idea of working across sectarian lines in many Arab countries generally meant employing "the security and intelligence services."

    One means of ensuring that violence does not spread from Iraq to other countries, Ms. Rice said, was to make sure that a fully representative government takes power in Baghdad.

    Ms. Rice said the United States has no clear evidence that shows who was behind the bombing of the Shiite mosque, the act that set off the destruction and bloodshed. But she, like others in Washington, seems inclined to blame Abu Moussab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader in Iraq.

    The perpetrators, she said, are "the people who are trying to start a civil war in Iraq. And that, by the way, is their stated aim, Zarqawi's stated aim; he wants to incite a civil war. It has usually been outside, foreign forces who talk about civil war, like the Al Qaeda forces that are operating there."

    Pressed later, however, she also acknowledged that, "yes, there are also Iraqis who don't want a national unity government to form. I did not say foreign fighters caused this."

    And then she repeated the view that she and other Bush administration officials frequently offer during dark times in Iraq.

    "They couldn't stop the election," she said. "They couldn't stop the constitution. So they are going to try again."