Pressure on Iraq Govt. to halt civil war

BAGHDAD, Saturday, (Reuters) - A U.N. envoy urged Iraq's government today to halt a slide into civil war and stop the “cancer” of sectarianism from destroying the country, warning that the carnage of this week could tear Iraq apart.

The U.N.'s special representative for Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, said car bombs on Thursday that killed more than 200 people in a Shi'ite area of Baghdad and “blind acts of revenge” were part of a vicious cycle of sectarian violence “tearing apart the very political and social fabric of Iraq”.

“No country could tolerate such a cancer in its body politic,” Qazi said in a statement.

The Shi'ite-led government has called for calm, desperate to avert the sort of sharp escalation in violence that followed an attack on a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February. This time, many fear, such revenge attacks could push Iraq over the edge.Fearful Iraqis spent sleepless nights guarding their homes and asking who would be next after gunmen attacked mosques and burned homes in a Sunni enclave on Friday following the worst bomb attack since Saddam Hussein's overthrow in April 2003.
Abu Marwah, who lives in the Jamia area of mainly Sunni west Baghdad, said: “All the men in the area were on alert ... we received information that militias were expected to attack. Of course we all had our Kalashnikovs.”

The city of 7 million was under a tight curfew imposed after 202 were killed in Sadr City, stronghold of the Mehdi Army, a militia loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that Sunni Arabs blame for thousands of death squad killings in recent months.“Everybody is tense, everybody is expecting something may happen at any moment,” said Abu Marwah, 40, a Sunni Arab translator who spent much of Friday night on the roof of his home, Kalashnikov in hand, keeping watch for militia attacks.

A dozen mortar rounds hit Sadr City on Saturday evening, but there were no casualties, residents said.

In apparent revenge for the Sadr City bombings, four mosques and homes were attacked in a Sunni enclave in northwest Baghdad on Friday, Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Salem al-Zobaie said.