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To: lurqer who wrote (34698)	1/10/2004 3:40:31 PM
From: lurqer	Respond to of 89467

Iraq attacks may signal religious strife An apparently coordinated attack against two Shiite mosques in a town where Muslim sects had lived peacefully has raised concerns about religious and ethnic strife as Shiites and Sunnis jockey for power in postwar Iraq. Five people were killed and dozens wounded when a gas cylinder rigged with an explosive blew up at the Sadiq Mohammed mosque as worshippers streamed out after prayers on Friday, Islam's holy day. Ninety minutes earlier, police defused a car bomb outside another nearby mosque. That bomb was packed with 330 pounds of TNT and rigged with four artillery shells and would have doubtless caused many more fatalities. "We've been living peacefully. There has never been a problem," said Hamid Jomoa, a 28-year-old Sunni preacher who rushed to help at the scene in Baqouba, a town 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. With sectarian tensions mounting, the U.S.-led occupation force has been accused of stirring up trouble: Some Iraqis at the scene of the bombing even suggested U.S. forces had fired a rocket at the mosque. Many Iraqis believe the United States and its allies are trying to foment disorder as a pretext for their continued rule, despite American assurances to the contrary. Others believe some countries in the region could be financing attacks to keep Iraq, which has the world's second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, divided and weak. "This attack aims at igniting sectarian disputes," said Salah Hassan, another bystander in Baqouba. "This is a Jewish-American scheme." Wailing women tried to cover body parts as the wounded walked in a daze. A man screamed in anguish as he knelt before two bodies. Blood covered the street, where worshippers who couldn't fit into the small Sadiq Mohammed mosque had set up prayer mats. In other developments: -- The U.S. military is investigating a report that American soldiers last week opened fire with a machine gun on a taxi in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, killing four Iraqi civilians, including a 7-year-old boy, and wounding the driver. -- Troops of the 3rd Battalion, 67th Armor Regiment captured five people and seized an assortment of weapons after they were attacked late Friday about 9 miles northeast of Baghdad, the U.S. command said. -- Ten Iraqis believed linked to the former regime were arrested late Friday about 12 miles west of Baghdad, the command said. They were believed part of an insurgent cell responsible for planting bombs in the area. Saddam's authoritarian rule gave the Sunnis dominance and kept ethnic and religious divisions largely in check. That ended with Saddam's ouster in April, giving Iraq's Shiites -- a majority in the population of 25 million -- an opportunity to end decades of subjugation. Since then, religious leaders on both sides have tried to prevent an eruption of conflict between the two groups. Yet also raising tensions are increasingly strident demands by Kurds, who are ethnically different from Arabs and dominate in the north. The Kurds want to expand the territory and power of the Switzerland-sized area they have ruled autonomously under the protection of a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone since the first Gulf War ended in 1991. Demands that the oil-rich city of Kirkuk join the Kurdish zone have roused Turkic and Arab residents to violent protests, and militants have turned to assassination. A Kurdish man walking in an Arab neighborhood of Kirkuk was gunned down and killed Friday, the city's Police Chief Torhan Youssef reported. Earlier, Youssef said coalition soldiers mistakenly killed two Iraqi police officers who were walking around carrying AK-47 assault rifles after dark but not wearing identity badges. U.S. spokeswoman Maj. Josslyn Aberle said the police were killed by soldiers who saw two men firing at a house. Aberle said the two, later identified as officers, were killed after they refused to put down their arms even after soldier fired warning shots. Elsewhere in Iraq, U.S. soldiers kicked open doors and dragged men out of their beds before dawn Friday in a raid aimed at Saddam loyalists in Tikrit. The military said they detained 30 men -- 14 suspected of orchestrating, financing or carrying out attacks on American soldiers. Among them was a man believed to have detonated a bomb that killed a female soldier from Texas. The raid came hours after a Black Hawk medevac helicopter was shot down Thursday near Fallujah, a town west of Baghdad that is a stronghold of resistance to the U.S. occupation. All nine U.S. soldiers on board were killed. A military statement Saturday that soldiers were continuing to recover parts of the helicopter and that "investigations continue to assess what brought the aircraft down." A witness at the scene said he saw a rocket hit the tail of the aircraft, the third U.S. helicopter forced down near Fallujah. boston.com lurqer