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Baghdad under daytime curfew
Iraqi troops and police are patrolling the deserted streets of Baghdad after the government imposed a daytime traffic curfew to avert possible violence between Sunnis and Shia on the day of the Muslim congregational prayer. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Iraqi prime minister, has warned clerics not to use inflammatory language from pulpits on Friday as he tried to rally Sunni and other leaders into a US-sponsored unity coalition to help staunch 10 days of sectarian bloodshed.The main minority Sunni bloc ended a boycott of talks called in protest at reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques after the bombing of a Shia shrine on 22 February. Violence has killed at least 500 people, even by conservative official accounts. But after al-Jaafari hosted a late-night meeting on Thursday of the main parties elected to parliament in December, political sources said Sunnis, Kurds and other leaders were still pushing the dominant Shia Alliance to ditch al-Jaafari as premier. A senior official in the Sunnis' Iraqi Accordance Front said: "The negotiations will go on, but we still insist on removing al-Jaafari." Posted by: Fred 2006-03-03 |
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