Civil War?

[Tigam]

It's the US's fault! Nothing to do with more than one group of Muslims fighting for power within their sect... Nothing to do with that.
Nope, that can't be... Nope, nope, nope....

BAGHDAD — Retaliatory massacres by gunmen and bombers linked to rival Muslim sects have left more than 130 people dead across Iraq over the last two days, the latest casualties of what some politicians now are calling an undeclared civil war.

At least 57 Iraqis were killed Tuesday and scores more injured when a suicide bomber lured a group of day laborers to his minivan with the promise of work before setting off explosives.

The bombing in Kufa rained blood, burnt debris and charred body parts on a small market across the street from the Muslim bin Aqil mosque, the main platform for radical Shiite cleric and militia leader Muqtada Sadr.

Since the beginning of May, attacks by Sunni Arab and Shiite Muslims have claimed the lives of more than 6,000 Iraqi civilians, according to a United Nations study and Iraqi police reports.

The Kufa blast, coming on the heels of mass killings and bombings attributed to Sadr's Al Mahdi militia and its Sunni Arab enemies, brought the battle to the Shiite cleric's doorstep, igniting fears of a fresh wave of reprisal killings.

"The message is clear, and the message confirms the sectarian differences," said Fadhil Sharih, a leader of the Sadr movement. "It seems clear that it's been moving toward the direction of civil war."

U.S. and Iraqi government leaders have argued that the 150,000-strong foreign troop presence has kept the country from descending into full-scale civil war. But many Iraqi officials fear the threshold has been crossed.

"What is happening in Iraq is a disaster and a tragedy," Adnan Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab leader, said in an interview.

"It's bloodshed and killing of the innocents, killing the elderly and women and children. It's mass killings. It's nothing less than an undeclared civil war."

Many members of Iraq's political class spoke gravely of the massacres and bombings of the last few days, even as two U.S. Cabinet officials visiting Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone this week touted Iraq as a potential bonanza for private investors.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni Arab political group, warned Tuesday that "Iraq is witnessing a grave escalation in violence," and it called on Iraqis "to return to their senses instead of slipping into the abyss."

The surge in violence has terrified residents of Baghdad and other mixed Sunni and Shiite areas. The Baghdad airport has been flooded with Iraqis of modest means seeking to escape even temporarily the country's upswing in sectarian slayings.

According to a U.N. study based on Health Ministry statistics, 2,669 Iraqi civilians were killed in May and 3,149 were killed in June. And this month, the violence appears to be accelerating, particularly in the Baghdad area that is the target of a sweeping security crackdown aimed at quelling the violence. U.S. and Iraqi troops launched the sweep, to great fanfare, after a visit in mid-June by President Bush.

"Things are getting worse," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker.

Even those who hesitate to call Iraq's sectarian violence a civil war have begun saying that defusing the situation will require the international mechanisms used to mediate previous ethnic, religious and political conflicts in Central America, the former Yugoslavia and Sri Lanka.

"I start to feel the need to say that there is a civil war," said Salim Abdullah Jabouri, a Sunni politician, "in order to borrow the tools and solutions of past civil wars to apply them here, and to call upon the international community to deal with Iraq's problems on this basis."

The latest cycle of violence began with the July 8 bombing of a small Shiite mosque in the Jihad neighborhood of southwest Baghdad.

Shiite militiamen took to the streets the next day, pulling Sunnis from their homes and cars and executing them on the spot.

A string of bombings targeting Shiite mosques and markets followed.

In the morgue, the bodies of Sunnis piled up, felled with single bullets to the head, apparently by Shiite death squads.

In fairness this is fairly normal in the US, only it's not nearly on that grand of a scale... We just call them gangs. Altho they generaly just try to kill each other rather than innocents. Not that they don't get killed in the cross fire from time to time...

[cashpath]

It is our fault.... Everything is our fault...

We're Pie eating, Jabroni beating, It doesn't matter what you think about peace talking, Whatchya gonna do when our tanks run over you-stomping a mud whole in your candy ***, and top it all off with a have a nice day.... Bastards.

[Chaos6]

We should just pull out and yell at them from the boarders to be nice to each other and make Peace while they kill each other off.