Iraq

As Iraq Violence Continues, Many Fear Return of Civil War
By Ned Parker and Raheem Salman
The Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2010
"Bombings gutted a market and destroyed at least five buildings in working-class Shiite Muslim areas of Baghdad on Tuesday, killing dozens as violence following last month's elections continued to escalate and raise fears among Iraqis that a new civil war could erupt. The blasts left mountains of rubble, burying men, women and children. Cranes lifted jagged walls, and rescuers tossed away bricks in hopes of finding survivors. The explosions appeared carefully planned, with unknown men renting rooms across west Baghdad, packing the rented spaces with explosives and then blowing them up Tuesday morning. The first blasts rocked the city shortly before 9 a.m. in the adjoining Shiite districts of Shula and Shukuk. Within the next two hours, a building that was home to a restaurant and children's arcade was dynamited in the Allawi neighborhood, a car bomb exploded and two more buildings were blown up elsewhere in west Baghdad. More than 50 people were killed, security sources and witnesses said. The attacks followed the Friday massacre of 25 Sunni Muslim men south of Baghdad and suicide car bomb attacks against three foreign missions in the capital that claimed the lives of 41 people on Sunday.
People standing near the sites of the bombings expressed rage and demanded answers. Some worried that sectarian war, which convulsed Iraq in 2006 and 2007, might return. 'People will get sick and tired,' said Hassan Aboudi, looking at a collapsed building in Shula. 'We don't wish this thing, but what will happen now? There are people without leaders.' Others blamed the warring political sides for seeking to undermine each other after the parliamentary elections produced no decisive winner. The results left Prime Minister Nouri Maliki in a bitter contest with former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite whose faction won a slim plurality. The sides are now maneuvering to see who can form a ruling coalition, and the competition has deteriorated along sectarian lines, with Maliki's Shiite supporters calling Allawi the choice of Sunni Arab extremists and former members of the late Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. [...]"