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US forces killed 22 people and wounded
eight at a mosque in east Baghdad in an incident likely to lead
to increased tensions with the Shia community. Police said the
US troops had retaliated after coming under fire.
Videotape showed a heap of
male bodies with gunshot wounds on the floor of the Imam's living
quarters in what was said to be the Al Mustafa mosque. There
were 5.56mm shell casings on the floor, which is the type of
ammunition used by US soldiers. A weeping man in white Arab robes
is shown stepping among the bodies.
At the office of Dawa, the
party of the Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Haidar al-Obaidi,
a senior Dawa official, said: "The lives of Iraqis are not
cheap. If the American blood is valuable to them, the Iraqi blood
is valuable to us."
The US military would neither
confirm not deny the incident but the US army in Iraq has been
strongly criticized over the past week for killing Iraqi civilians
and falsely claiming that they were insurgents or caught in cross
fire.
The shooting took place in
a neighborhood dominated by the Mehdi Army militia of the nationalist
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and some of those who died may have belonged
to his movement. Salam al-Maliki, an official of the Sadr bloc,
said that a hospital to which the wounded had been taken was
later surrounded by US troops.
Hazin al-Araji, an aide to
Mr Sadr, claimed: "The American forces went into the Mustafa
mosque at prayers and killed more than 20 worshippers. They tied them
up and shot them."
The killings may mark another
step in the deteriorating relations between the US and Iraq's
Shia community, 60 per cent of the population. Shia leaders fear
that the US is trying to rob them of the fruits of their success
in the election on December 15 when the Shia coalition won 130
out of 275 seats. Another US military move likely to be resented
was a raid yesterday on a building of the Interior Ministry,
controlled by Shias, in the mistaken belief that it was a torture
centre. It turned out to contain 17 Sudanese legally detained
for breach of residency laws who had not been mistreated.
The US is desperately seeking
to pressure Iraqi politicians into forming a national unity government
to reverse the country's slide into sectarian civil war. The
US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, asked the Iraqi leadership
to "overcome the strife that threatens to rip apart Iraq"
. Forty, bodies, some beheaded, were found yesterday in Baghdad
and Baquba. The prolonged failure to form a government underlines
the deep fissures dividing the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities
and make it unlikely that national unity government would be
effective. Even before last night's events the Shia coalition
resented the campaign by President Jalal Talabani, supported
by the US and UK, to get rid of Mr Jaafari as Prime Minister.
The US and UK want Sunni politicians, as well as Iyad Allawi,
to be members of a new administration.
"The US and UK were shocked
that the Shia coalition did so well," said a participant
in the negotiations to form a government. "Since then they
hoped it would split. But the Shia parties have stuck behind
Jaafari ... Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Hawza [Shia
religious hierarchy] are for Shia unity and the Iranians want
the coalition to stay together."
The present government, formed
following the election on January 30 last year, is a Shia-Kurdish
alliance. One Kurdish observer said: "For the Kurds it would
be suicidal to side with the Sunni and Iyad Allawi because they
would alienate 60 per cent of the population."
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