Sectarian fury as Shiites and Sunnis stage protests

Sectarian tension whipped through Iraq as thousands of Shiite and Sunni Muslim protesters mixed calls for an end to America’s occupation with stinging condemnations of each other.

In an effort to stop the country from plunging into a civil war, prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said yesterday in Turkey that he would travel to Syria soon in an effort to stop militants from crossing into Iraq.

His decision to go to Damascus follows US military claims that top lieutenants of al Qaida in Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi met in Syria last month to plot more suicide bombings in Iraq.

Syria is under pressure to stop terrorists infiltrating Iraq, where more than 520 people have been killed in multiple suicide bombings and assassinations since the April 28 announcement of al-Jaafari’s Shiite-led government.

In Turkey, al-Jaafari said Iraq would not tolerate foreign fighters crossing the porous desert frontier separating his country from Syria.

“We will visit Syria some time soon, and one of the issues that will be taken up will be the security file and the prevention of such infiltrations,” he said.

Tensions spiralled throughout Iraq, particularly in its southern Shiite heartland, as more than 10,000 protesters heeded a call by anti-US cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to step on and drive over American and Israeli flags painted on roads outside mosques.

He made his call after US and Iraqi forces detained 13 al-Sadr supporters during a raid this week on a Shiite mosque in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad.

Al-Sadr, a burly, black-bearded cleric, launched two uprisings against US forces in Baghdad and Najaf in April and August last year, then went into hiding before surfacing on Monday to demand that US-led forces withdraw from Iraq.

Crowds of 2,000 people attended angry mosque services in the Shiite-dominated cities Najaf, nearby Kufa and Nasiriyah, where a gunfight broke out between al-Sadr supporters and guards protecting a local provincial governor’s office.

Four policemen and four civilians were wounded, a hospital official said, as were nine al-Sadr supporters, said Sheikh al-Khafaji, an official at al-Sadr’s Nasiriyah office.

“From this platform, we warn the government not to fight the al-Sadr movement because all the tyrants of the world could not beat it,” Hazim al-Araji, the imam of a Kufa mosque said during yesterday’s sermon. “We say to the government do not be a tyrant like Saddam or (former interim Iraqi prime minister Iyad) Allawi.”

Another 5,000 al-Sadr supporters marched in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum, the scene of fierce fighting last year between US forces and fighters from his al-Mahdi Army.

Al-Sadr told Arab TV station Al-Jazeera that he spoke with Harith al-Dhari, head of Iraq’s influential Sunni Muslim Association of Muslim Scholars, to negotiate between the Sunni group and the Badr Brigades, the military wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The association accuses the brigades of kidnapping and killing Sunni clerics, claims the militia denies.

Sunni clerics delivered fiery sermons in Baghdad and Ramadi, in western Iraq’s volatile Sunni Triangle, where 3,000 worshippers prayed under a baking sun and heeded a call from three of Iraq’s most influential Sunni organisations for places of worship to be shut for three days to protest alleged Shiite violence against them.

In Baghdad’s Sunni Um al-Qura mosque, cleric Sheikh Ahmed al-Samaraei accused security forces of killing Sunni Muslims last week in the capital’s eastern Shaab suburb.

“Blood of Muslims is cheap for them,” al-Samaraei said. “We are still calling for relaxing and settling things, but I demand the government investigates what happened or the matters will worsen.”

Shiites make up 60% of Iraq’s 26 million people and were oppressed under Saddam, but emerged January elections with the biggest voting bloc in parliament.

Meanwhile, a picture of Saddam Hussein wearing only his underwear appeared on the front pages of Britain’s The Sun and the New York Post after being provided by an unidentified US military official, the papers said.

The US military condemned the photos and launched an immediate investigation into who took them. The pictures, taken in the former dictator’s Baghdad prison cell, were apparently shot about a year ago, the military said.

Saddam’s chief lawyer, Ziad al-Khasawneh, said his legal team was preparing a lawsuit against the newspapers. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the photo’s release violated US military procedures.

US president George Bush said he did not think they would incite further anti-American sentiment in Iraq, but added a thorough military investigation was needed.

Saddam was captured in December 2003 and is being held by the US military at an undisclosed location believed to be Baghdad. He faces charges including killing rival politicians during his 30-year rule, gassing Kurds, invading Kuwait in 1990 and suppressing Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in 1991. No trial dates have been set.