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Car bombs and shootings kill around 60 in Iraq
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Car bombs and shootings kill around 60 in Iraq
A spate of car bombings and shootings across Iraq killed about 60 people, but Prime minister Nuri al-Maliki said violence was on the decrease and that the country would never slide into a civil war.
A top government official said Maliki planned to reshuffle his coalition cabinet just 100 days after it was formed because he wanted to root out disloyal or poorly performing ministers and rally factions behind his national reconciliation plan.
The deputy premier also told Reuters Iraq hoped its plans to attract investment and create jobs could stem a descent into civil war and that foreign leaders should back a UN economic package next month or face disaster for the entire Middle East.
Car bombs exploded in Baghdad, the town of Khallis north of the capital, the northern oil city of Kirkuk and Basra in the Shi’ite south, a day after Maliki secured a pledge from tribal leaders to help stamp out sectarian violence and defeat insurgents. “Violence has decreased and our security ability is increasing. We are not in civil war and will never be in civil war,” Maliki told CNN in a recorded interview on Sunday.
“What you see is an atmosphere of reconciliation.” In Khallis, a religiously mixed town, gunmen stormed a market and cafe, killing 16 people and wounding 25, police said.
In one of the worst attacks of the day, a bomb blew apart a minibus in a busy commercial road in central Baghdad, killing nine people and sending black smoke billowing into the air.
The minibus blast followed a car bomb attack on Iraq’s best-selling newspaper, the government-owned al-Sabah, that killed two employees and badly damaged the building.
Editor-in-chief Falah al-Meshaal said the newspaper, part of the US-funded Iraqi Media Network that Sunni insurgents have attacked before, was published as normal yesterday.
In potentially oil rich Basra, where Maliki has imposed a state of emergency to deal with increasing violence fuelled by tensions between rival Shi’ite Muslim factions, seven people were killed by a motorcycle bomb in a market, officials said.
British troops are under mounting pressure in the southern oil hub. But London’s new envoy to Iraq insisted on Sunday that, despite his predecessor’s leaked view this month that civil war was a strong possibility, he was “optimistic” such an outcome could be avoided if Maliki could rally Iraqis behind him.
Torture signs</B>
Police said 20 bodies had been found in parts of Baghdad on Saturday. Some bore signs of torture and most had been killed by gunshots to the head, a typical feature of the sectarian bloodshed between Iraq’s Shi’ite majority and Sunni Arabs.
Thousands of US and Iraqi troops have launched a major operation in Baghdad to pacify the capital. Violence claimed the lives of over 3,000 Iraqis in July, many of them in Baghdad.
Maliki won support for his reconciliation plan from the tribal leaders gathered in Baghdad on Saturday, but it is unclear how influential they will be among Iraqis increasingly turning to religious leaders for guidance. No major Sunni guerrilla group has signed up to Maliki’s plan and much of the violence now gripping the capital is the work of smaller groups on both sides of the Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian divide. Sunnis say it is fuelled by militias linked to parties within the prime minister’s Shi’ite-dominated coalition.
Maliki’s planned cabinet reshuffle would partly involve the political movement of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia has clashed repeatedly in recent weeks with US and Iraqi forces, several political sources said.
A key player in the government, Sadr denies his militia runs some sectarian death squads.
“There will be a government reshuffle. There will be some changes in a number of cabinet portfolios,” Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, the most senior Kurdish official in the cabinet, told Reuters in an interview.
Salih, the government’s economy supremo, said the need to clamp down on sectarian and ethnic violence would not distract him from working to develop Iraq’s vast potential oil wealth. Restoring prosperity could help rein in the killing, he said.
“Undeniably security has to rank at the top,” said Salih, the most senior ethnic Kurd in the cabinet. “But does that mean at the expense of the economy and services? You cannot. All these things are inter-related.” Salih said success in Iraq would have good consequences for the region and the rest of the world.
“God forbid, failure in Iraq will be disastrous for everybody, not just for the people of Iraq,” he said.
<B>Ross COLVIN</B>
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