IRAQ:The US military yesterday predicted an upsurge in sectarian fighting in Iraq in the coming weeks - tit-for-tat revenge killings triggered by last week's devastating bombings in a Shia stronghold in Baghdad.
But US military spokesman Maj Gen William Caldwell said the violence did not yet meet the military's definition of civil war, despite what he called a "dramatic spike" in killings and "violence raging in Baghdad's streets".
Some commentators say the country is already in the midst of a sectarian war between majority Shia, oppressed under Saddam Hussein but now politically dominant, and the former Iraqi leader's fellow minority Sunnis.
The debate has become louder since last week's car bombings in the Shia slum of Sadr City, which killed more than 200 people in the worst attack since the US invasion in 2003 and sparked revenge killings in Sunni neighbourhoods.
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan said on Monday Iraq was close to civil war, but president George Bush yesterday accused Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda of fomenting violence.
Maj Gen Caldwell blamed al-Qaeda for the Sadr City bombings, saying the militant group was trying to set Shias and Sunnis at each other's throats, weaken prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shia-led government and cause general anarchy.
Violence has surged between the two rival sects, killing more than 100 people a day, the UN estimates, since the bombing of a Shia shrine at Samarra in February.
"We expect to see elevated levels of violence in the next couple of weeks . . . al-Qaeda, foreign terrorists and extremists do not want to let Iraqis decide their own future," Maj Gen Caldwell told a briefing in Baghdad. He said the military had already noted an increase in mortar and rocket attacks between militant groups on both sides of the Tigris river.
While 7,000 al-Qaeda fighters had been killed or captured since October 2004, he said, they were "punching back" in Baghdad neighbourhoods that had been cleared as part of Operation Together Forward, a crackdown that US generals have called the defining battle of the war.