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Dozens Of Iraqis Killed in Reprisals
In a Kirkuk hospital, neighbors stay with Moimen Yasir, 6, who lost all five members of his immediate family in one of a series of closely timed bombings.
(By Yahya Ahmed -- Associated Press)
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Alwan accused members of al-Qaeda in Iraq of setting off the violence and then standing by as Sunni civilians were killed in retaliatory attacks.
"When the commandos of the Badr Brigade entered the town, we did not see Qaeda fighting them. They were only spectators to see how the Sunnis are being slaughtered," he said.
In tiny Sunni towns throughout the area, Sunni men and boys as young as 10 took up arms to defend against any Shiite militias entering, said Khaled al-Jubouri, a Sunni sheik in Duluiyah. Jubouri said that he had declined a request for peace talks with the Shiite elders of Balad and that he wanted the Shiite militiamen surrendered to Sunni authorities and an apology.
By late Sunday, residents were saying that no American forces had intervened, despite some earlier reports that they had. U.S. military spokesmen did not immediately respond to a midafternoon request for clarification.
In Baghdad, Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Kareem al-Kinani said Iraqi reinforcements had been sent to the area, but he denied that any forces of Iraq's Shiite-dominated police had sided with militias.
Iraqi police often are accused of working with the Shiite militias in attacks on Sunnis. The Interior Ministry denies the allegation.
Maliki, in a nationally televised speech, used the one-year anniversary of a referendum on a U.S.-backed constitution to renew a pledge to disband militias. "The government is determined to disband the militias," he said. "Weapons should be only in the hands of the government."
Further demonstrating the growing fragmentation in Iraq, a bloc of Sunni insurgent groups marked the anniversary by declaring a separate Islamic republic in Iraq, stretching from the western province of Anbar to Baghdad, Kirkuk and other parts of the north. The announcement was made by a spokesman for the Mujaheddin Shura Council, an umbrella organization of insurgent groups that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, and aired by al-Jazeera satellite television.
The statement noted the creation of a separate Kurdish republic in northern Iraq and a push by some Shiite parties for a separate republic in the south. The Shiite region, with the aid of Iran, had been "protecting militias with black hearts and minds that have delved deeply into the killing, torturing and displacing of the Sunnis, our people," it said.
A key Sunni bloc, the Muslim Scholars Association, denounced the declaration, as did some Sunni insurgent groups, including the Islamic Army, which said in a statement that it was not an enemy of the country's Shiites and was against the breakup of Iraq.
A report released by the U.S. Department of Defense in late August said there were 10 times as many sectarian attacks in July as there were in January in Iraq.
In Washington, Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said by telephone: "If you total up the number of people that are being killed, that are being wounded, that are being displaced and are being forced to leave the country, and the zones in which there is major civil conflict . . . trying to declare there isn't a civil war borders on the absurd."
