Iraq violence kills 31, undermines peace talks
A series of vehicle bombs and shootings have killed at least 31 people and wounded scores more across Iraq, stoking sectarian anger in the run-up to a national unity conference.
A car bomb exploded in a busy market near the Al-Kamaliyah mosque in a mainly Shiite district of east Baghdad, killing at least 10 civilians and wounding another 26, a security official said Wednesday.
Bodies of the victims lay scattered around the street amid pools of blood and the burning wreckage of at least two cars and a row of market stalls set up by a nearby bus station.
Two more car bombs were set off later in Baghdad Jadida, a Shiite neighbourhood, killing five day labourers waiting for work and wounding 10. Another blast in southern Baghdad wounded two people.
The bombings mirrored an attack Tuesday, when two suicide bombers blew their cars up amid another crowd of casual workers, mostly Shiites, killing 70 and wounding more than 200 in Baghdad's Tayaran Square.
In another attack, two truck bombs smashed into a base of Iraq's oil infrastructure protection force, killing 10 soldiers and wounding six, an officer on the scene said, adding that three civilians were also injured.
One after another, the trucks ploughed into the military base near the town of Riyadh, 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the oil centre of Kirkuk and along the pipelines carrying crude to the massive Baiji refinery.
The Strategic Infrastructure Brigade, an army unit formed out of local tribesmen, is tasked with protecting the northern oil fields and the hundreds of miles of pipeline snaking across the flat plains of northern Iraq.
Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, said the answer to the violence was to withdraw US troops from the capital to enable them to chase Sunni insurgents while Iraqi forces put down sectarian bloodshed.
"It is very important that the coalition forces should not be seen siding with any factions. This is basically a war between the two extremists, the Sunni extremists and the Shiite," he said, in an intervie with CNN.
"The multinational forces should not be in the middle; this is a job for the Iraqi security forces," he said, adding that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had agreed this change of tactics with US President George W. Bush.
The surge in bloodshed came three days ahead of a national reconciliation conference organised by Maliki in what might be his last chance to curb the violence.
Saturday's talks will aim to bring the leaders of Iraq's warring sects and political factions under one roof to allow them to solve their differences without recourse to the rival militias backing almost every party.
The conference will be boycotted by a Sunni religious body, the Muslim Scholars' Association, which is accused of links with some of the insurgent groups fighting the US-backed government.
Kurdish lawmaker Mahmud Othman, a member of Maliki's national reconciliation committee, said there would be no point in inviting the association.
"The association's continual rejection of the political process and its announcement that it will not take part in this process make it unnecessary to extend an invitation," he said.
Maliki, who is under tremendous pressure from within his own ruling Shiite coalition, has failed to bring security to Iraq and especially Baghdad, and the sectarian war now threatens to turn into a regional conflict.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Saudi Arabia will support Iraq's Sunnis if violence continues after US troops withdraw from the country.
King Abdullah conveyed the warning to Vice President Dick Cheney two weeks ago during Cheney's visit to Riyadh, the daily reported, citing Arab diplomats.
"It's a hypothetical situation, and we'd work hard to avoid such a structure," one Arab diplomat in Washington told the newspaper.
"If things become so bad in Iraq, like an ethnic cleansing, we will feel we are pulled into the war," the diplomat added.
Sunni Saudi Arabia's anxiety is mounting amid allegations that Iraq's Shiite eastern neighbour Iran is arming militias of its co-religionists to fight the Sunni Arab minority.
On Tuesday, the White House said Bush will unveil a new Iraq strategy in early 2007 that will aim to tackle the sectarian bloodletting and facilitate an eventual troop withdrawal.
US public support for the war has collapsed -- with one poll showing that only 15 percent of Americans think Bush can win.
The president is consulting with US diplomats and military officials as well as senior Iraqi leaders in order to draw up a new Iraq strategy.
In other violence a roadside bomb against a police patrol in Baiji killed one woman and wounded three others, while gunmen murdered five people in separate attacks in and around the city of Baquba.
AFP
