Tensions running high in Iraq
2005-05-20 12:58
Baghdad - Iraqi Shiites wiped their feet on painted United States flags outside mosques on Friday as they went to the main weekly Muslim prayers, while Sunnis leaders called for a "prayer strike" to protest at sectarian violence.
US military commanders in Iraq warned Iraqi military and police to stop abusing detainees, after US soldiers made more than 100 allegations about such abuses, the Washington Post newspaper reported.
In Baghdad there was evident tension among worshippers following Thursday's bombing of a small Shiite mosque in the southern Saydiya district, which left two dead and five wounded.
Late last month, a suicide bomber detonated a car outside another Shiite mosque in Baghdad during Friday prayers, killing nine and wounding nearly 30.
Religious leaders have repeatedly warned against acts aimed at sowing division between Shiites and Sunnis, but tensions have risen even further over the past week following the discovery of dozens of mutilated bodies - some of them Sunnis - in and around Baghdad.
Insurgents "are trying to split the society through sectarian killings," US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick said on Thursday in Baghdad.
The Committee of Muslim Scholars, Iraq's main Sunni religious authority, earlier this week accused a Shiite militia of killing Sunnis, including three imams.
"It is the Badr Organisation which is responsible for these killings. I take responsibility for what I am saying," Hareth al-Dhari, spokesperson for the Committee of Muslim Scholars, told a news conference.
The Badr Organisation replaced the officially disbanded militia of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of two leading political parties in the United Iraqi Alliance, which now dominates the government.
Iraq's interior minister, a Shiite, and defence minister, a Sunni, have denied their forces were involved, but the allegations have raised the spectre of sectarian war between majority Shiites and the disempowered Sunni minority of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
Three Sunni organisations - the Committee of Muslim Scholars, the Iraqi Islamic Party, and the Waqf (religious endowment) - on Thursday called for the closure of Sunni mosques and a three-day "prayer strike", starting on Friday evening, to protest against the recent killings.
The ruling applies only to prayers in mosques, not to the private prayers observed by Muslims.
Ahead of Friday prayers, freshly-painted US and Israeli flags appeared outside a number of Shiite mosques in response to a call by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr for the faithful to wipe their feet on the flags to protest at an alleged desecration of the Qu'ran at the US detention camp in Guantanamo.
And about 2 000 people, carrying copies of the Qu'ran, marched in protest on Friday in Nasiriyah, 375km south of Baghdad.