Baghdad under curfew, government seeks unity
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-03-03 15:23

Since Sunni Arabs took part in the US-sponsored election in December, President George W. Bush has been pushing hard for the ruling Shi'ites to bring them into a national coalition.

He says that could bring stability and let him start bringing home some of the 133,000 American soldiers now in Iraq. He said this week Iraqis had a choice between "chaos or unity."

APPEAL

Jaafari made a late-night appearance on state television to urge religious leaders to defuse sectarian passions from the pulpit: "The clerics of Friday must express themselves in the language of national unity," he said.

"We will take firm action against inflammatory rhetoric."

Traffic was banned in Baghdad but people will be able to walk to weekly prayers, officials said -- similar to a three-day curfew last weekend that helped damp down the initial violence.

After a bomb on a minibus in his teeming and impoverished Sadr City bastion in Baghdad killed five people, Sadr's Mehdi Army militia said it would defend its neighborhoods.

But the US military, which mauled Sadr's militia in two anti-American uprisings in 2004, warned Sadr's forces.

"We are not going to allow him to take control of security of any area across Iraq, nor would the Iraqi government," said Major General Rick Lynch.

Jaafari has ordered thousands of troops and police onto the streets of Baghdad, backed by US soldiers, but their effectiveness is untested and their loyalties are uncertain in the face of sectarian militias to which some once belonged.

Fearful of reprisal attacks, some Baghdad residents have thrown up barricades. Others are leaving their homes.

US and Iraqi leaders accuse al Qaeda militants of bombing the Golden Mosque in Samarra to drag Shi'ites into a civil war that would wreck US plans. Some Sunnis say Iranian-backed Shi'ites did it to justify reprisals against the Sunni Arab minority.

The US military said it captured 61 al Qaeda fighters in the west and a U.S. security official told Reuters that forces were on the alert for another major attack by the group, led by Jordanian Sunni militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"There's been concern that Zarqawi might try to launch a large-scale attack," the official said. "That's been the case for some time ... not just been since the Samarra attack."