There goes the Najaf neighborhood .... again. Is widespread civil war far off?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/iraq

Shiites Stage Mass Anti-U.S. Protests
May 20, 2005

NAJAF, Iraq - Thousands of Shiites, many waving Islam's holy book over their heads, protested the U.S. presence in Iraq on Friday after the detention of several supporters of a radical cleric, while Sunnis shut down places of worship elsewhere in a show of anger over alleged sectarian violence against the minority.

The U.S. military also launched what it said would be an aggressive investigation into how a British newspaper got pictures of an imprisoned Saddam Hussein clad only in his underwear, saying the photos violated military guidelines and possibly the Geneva convention on the humane treatment of prisoners.

The photos, which appeared on the front pages of the British tabloid Sun and the New York Post and were broadcast across the Middle East by some Arab satellite networks, were expected to fuel anti-American sentiment among supporters of the former dictator who are believed to be the driving force behind the country's insurgency.

The Shiite protests in the southern cities of Najaf, Kufa and Nasiriyah, came as Iraq's Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced that he will visit Syria, which has been accused of harboring insurgents bent on starting a civil war in Iraq.

The protests, which drew an estimated total of 6,000 demonstrators in the three cities, followed radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's call Wednesday to reject the U.S. occupation of Iraq by painting Israeli and American flags on the ground outside mosques to be stepped on in protest raids against holy places.

I always figured that the civil war in Iraq would begin in the Kurdish region but looks like Baghdad may go ahead and take that prize. Shiite on Bush!


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1623875,00.html

Iraq

May 23, 2005

Fear of civil war grows as Shia start to retaliate
From Richard Beeston in Baghdad

THEY HAVE lived side by side for generations, but the small farming communities south of Baghdad are being split apart by a vicious sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias that many Iraqis fear could be a step on the path to civil war.

As politicians in Baghdad struggle to bring the communities back from the brink, fresh accounts are emerging from the fertile area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of the capital of the latest cycle of violence.

Now Sunnis say that restraint has ended. Last week around 50 bodies of murdered Shias and Sunnis, including 15 Sunni Arabs with links to the Muslim Scholars’ Board, were dumped in Baghdad. They included the body of Sheikh Hassan al-Neimi, a Sunni cleric who had been arrested by men in police uniforms.

His death was blamed on the Badr Brigade, an Iranian-trained force whose Shia leaders are ministers in the Government. It led to a three-day strike by Sunnis, who refused to pray in their own mosques, and to calls for Bayan Jabr, the Interior Minister, to resign.

“The Shias are taking over everything,” Kamel Daoud, 41, a taxi driver from the notorious town of Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, said. “They are seizing our mosques. They are preventing Sunnis from getting government jobs. They dominate the police and National Guard. They spy for the Americans. This is all part of their plan to eject us from our land.”

As fears grow that sectarian passions could spiral out of control, leaders on both sides appear to be pulling back from the brink. On Saturday more than 1,000 Sunni religious, political and tribal figures met in Baghdad to create a new umbrella organisation that will co-operate with the Shia-led Government and negotiate over a new constitution.