Blind revenge acts; ignoring Muslim pledge, may lead Iraq to civil war

UN envoy to Iraq Ashraf Qazi on Saturday urged Iraq's government to stop a slide into civil war and stop the cancer of sectarianism from destroying the country.

Qazi said in a statement that the car bombs that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite area of Baghdad on Thursday and "blind acts of revenge" were part of a vicious cycle of sectarian violence tearing apart the very political and social fabric of Iraq.

"No country could tolerate such a cancer in its body politic." The city of 7 million was under a tight curfew imposed after 202 were killed in Sadr City, stronghold of the Mehdi Army loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

In apparent revenge for the Sadr City bombings, four mosques and homes were attacked in a Sunni enclave in northwest Baghdad on Friday, Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Salem al-Zobaie said.

Police found the bodies of 21 men and boys from an extended Shiite family on Saturday in a mainly Sunni Arab village in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.

President Jalal Talabani, convened senior government leaders on Friday.

"For the first time we exchanged views openly," he said. Another meeting was set for Saturday.

Sunni Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi said all sides should work together, but top Sunni religious leader, Harith al-Dari, wanted on an arrest warrant for inciting violence currently on Cairo visit, rejected the call.

Aides of Sadr have threatened to pull out of the government if Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki goes ahead with a planned meeting with US President George W. Bush in Jordan next week.

Meantime, The Organization of the Islamic Conference called Saturday for an end to the Sunni-Shia bloodbath in Iraq, reminding Iraqi religious leaders of their pledge last October to prohibit the shedding of Muslim blood.

"OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu expressed deep concern and sorrow at the heinous acts of violence in Iraq, the abhorrent sectarian fighting and the repugnant massacres among the brothers in faith," said a statement issued at the OIC secretariat in Jeddah.

Ihsanoglu urged all Iraqis, Muslim scholars and their religious leaders to fear God in their faith, people and country and to refrain from committing these prohibited grave sins.

His call for an end to violence comes after his initiative of the Mecca Document, which was endorsed by the senior religious leaders and Muslim scholars in Iraq.

Both Shia and Sunni, who vowed to God in front of the holy Kaaba in Mecca not to violate the sanctity of Muslim blood and to incriminate those who shed it.

Ihsanoglu was referring to a 10-point document endorsed by 29 Iraqi Sunni and Shia religious leaders in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, in which they appealed for an end to sectarian killings and declared that the spilling of Muslim blood was forbidden.

The Iraqi religious leaders made the appeal during an October 20 meeting sponsored by the 57-member OIC, but was not heeded afterwards.

This comes as a top Iraqi government national security advisor Mowafak al-Rubaie, as seen on CNN, warned the Iraqi faction that continuing on the path they are on may lead the country to split apart.