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Bus bombing follows calls for calm in Iraq
A bomb killed five people at a bus station south of Baghdad on Sunday, breaking a relative calm after Iraqi and U.S. leaders appealed for an end to days of sectarian bloodshed that have pitched Iraq toward civil war.

A bomb in the washroom of a Shi‘ite mosque in the second city of Basra caused minor injuries, police said; it went off shortly after a rally in another part of the city by visiting young Shi‘ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a fiery militia leader.

The Hilla bomb destroyed a minibus as it drove out of a bus garage. Hilla is a mainly Shi‘ite town surrounded by Sunni villages, and the attack came two days short of the anniversary of the bloodiest single al Qaeda bombing, which killed 125 people there a year ago.

Hours earlier, following a round of calls to Iraqi leaders by U.S. President George W. Bush President George W. Bush, Shi‘ite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari made a midnight televised appeal, flanked by Sunni and Kurdish politicians, to Iraqis not to turn on each other after Wednesday‘s suspected al Qaeda bomb at a Shi‘ite shrine.

A three-hour meeting produced a commitment from the main factions to form a unity coalition, although Sunni leader Tareq al-Hashemi said he was not yet ready to end a boycott of the U.S.-sponsored coalition talks.

Four days of tit-for-tat reprisals have left more than 200 dead and mosques damaged, despite a daytime curfew on Baghdad that went into its third day on Sunday; the defense minister warned of the risk of a civil war that "will never end."

With a traffic ban in force, Baghdad was largely quiet. But a policeman was killed and two were wounded when their patrol was hit by two roadside bombs near Madaen, another flashpoint for Sunni-Shi‘ite violence just southeast of the city.

In Hilla, police said it was not clear if the bomb was inside the minibus or exploded in the road as it passed, just as it was leaving the bus station.

Jaafari, under U.S. pressure to forge a national unity government after an election in December, the first that the once-dominant Sunni minority had taken part in, said he was hopeful that Iraqis would step back from sectarian strife.

"The Iraqi people have one enemy; it is terrorism and only terrorism. There are no Sunnis against Shi‘ites," he said.

In Basra, Sadr appeared at a rally to call for Muslim unity against U.S. occupation and summoned his many followers to hold joint prayers next Friday at Sunni mosques, especially those damaged in the past days‘ violence.

Shortly afterwards, journalists heard a loud blast nearby that turned out to have been in a Shi‘ite mosque.

Though Sadr‘s black-clad Mehdi Army militia have been accused by officials of taking part in attacks on Sunni mosques, Sadr himself, his influence rising within the ruling but factionalised Shi‘ite Islamist bloc, denies ordering violence.

However, Shi‘ites‘ show of force after the bloodless destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra has exceeded any sparked by even al Qaeda attacks on the scale of last year‘s Hilla bombing, and may strengthen the rival militia leaders‘ hands in negotiations with Sunnis and with fellow Shi‘ites.

The White House said Bush, in his calls to Baghdad, had encouraged the leaders to "continue to work together to thwart the efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord."

Jaafari said that "all, or most" of the leaders who met on Saturday had "expressed the importance of accelerating the political process without any delay."

Sunni leader Hashemi called the meeting "a first step in the right direction," but said his Accordance Front would not rejoin formal coalition talks immediately.

"We agreed ... we need to form a government as quickly as possible," Hashemi said, but he added that the Front wanted progress on its complaints about violence before taking part in the talks.

U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been criticised by Shi‘ite leaders this week for pushing to have Sunnis brought into government, said a unity government would help avert the risk of civil war -- a risk he said had lessened on Saturday.

"There is still a danger," he told reporters. "But the risk of going to war because of the ... bombing has diminished."

In a lengthy interview on Iraqi state television, he told Iraqis that Washington was ready to help in any way: "The United States has a lot invested in Iraq. Iraq‘s failures are ours."

Senior Iraqi government figures fear some Shi‘ites may stop heeding calls from their religious leaders for restraint.

Iraqi and U.S. officials blamed the bloodless but symbolic attack on Samarra‘s Golden Mosque on al Qaeda, saying it wants to wreck the project for democracy in Iraq; al Qaeda accused Shi‘ites of carrying it out as an excuse for attacks on Sunnis.
Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-02-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=143838