From combined dispatches
BAGHDAD — A motorcade carrying Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was pelted with stones by fellow Shi’ites in a Baghdad slum when he paid respects yesterday to some of the more than 200 people who died there in bomb attacks last week.
The anger in Sadr City, stronghold of the Madhi Army militia, boiled over on the third day of a curfew imposed on the capital by Mr. al-Maliki’s national unity coalition as it scrambled to keep popular passions from exploding into all-out civil war.
“It’s all your fault,” one man shouted as a crowd began to surge around Mr. al-Maliki. Men and youths jeered and jostled as his armored convoy edged through the throng away from a mourning ceremony for one of the victims of Thursday’s multiple car bomb attack.
Subsequent reprisals against Sunni mosques and homes and three days of sporadic mortar fire have kept the city’s 7 million people locked down at home, fearful of what may come when the traffic ban ends today.
Politicians from all sides issued a new joint appeal for calm.
“We are counting on you, a great nation,” Shi’ite, Sunni and ethnic Kurdish leaders said in the statement. “Do not let those who are depriving you of security impinge on your unity. They want to drag you all into angry reactions.”
However, the statement did nothing to stop the violence.
A car bomb killed six persons yesterday in a mainly Shi’ite town south of Baghdad.
Aides to Sunni parliamentarian Adnan al-Dulaimi said gunmen fired on his home in the capital, and Sunni clerics said militants had again attacked Sunni mosques in western Baghdad.
Two mortar rounds hit a U.S. military post in eastern Baghdad, setting it on fire and leaving a dark cloud of smoke above the Baladiyat neighborhood, police and witnesses said.
Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a U.S. military spokesman, confirmed that “indirect fire rounds” hit the area, but he declined to provide details. No casualties were reported.
Fighting also raged between Iraqi security forces and Sunni Arab insurgents for a second day in Baqouba, the capital of Diyala province north of Baghdad.
By the end of the day, the province’s latest casualty figures were a microcosm of the brutality in Iraq: 17 insurgents killed, 15 detained, 20 civilians kidnapped, three bodies found, one U.S. Marine killed and two wounded. The mayor of a municipality narrowly escaped an assassination attempt that killed one of his guards and wounded three.
During fighting Saturday in Baqouba, police killed at least 36 insurgents and wounded dozens after scores of militants armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked government buildings in the city center, police said.
On Saturday, officials including Defense Minister Abdul-Qader al-Obaidi and Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, met and decided to fire Diyala’s police commander, saying he was unable to stop infiltration of the force by Sunni insurgents, two Iraqi officials said.
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