Newsday: A Violent Cycle In Iraq (Retaliatory Killings & Civil War)

Excellent analysis. Emphasis on sectarian violence and reprisals:

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wosect224272672may23,0,5314425,print.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines

A violent cycle in Iraq
Retaliatory killings, mainly involving Shias and Sunnis, threaten to throw country into deadly civil war

BY MOHAMAD BAZZI
MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT

May 23, 2005

BEIRUT, Lebanon - The signs of sectarian warfare are everywhere in Iraq these days: clerics assassinated outside their mosques, dozens of execution victims turning up in ditches and car bombers inflicting heavy casualties on the country's Shia Muslim majority.

Nearly four months after Iraq's election, when millions of Iraqis defied insurgent threats by voting for a new parliament, sectarian violence now threatens to drag the country into civil war. Most victims so far have been Shias targeted by Sunni insurgents. But the recent discoveries throughout Iraq of more than 50 bodies - men from both sects, apparently abducted and executed - highlight a new problem: a wave of retaliatory killings between Sunnis and Shias.

It is the worst-case scenario that many Iraqis have feared since the insurgency's early days: that persistent attacks against the Shia community would drive Shia militias to seek revenge against Sunni civilians, prompting a new cycle of violence that would destroy any hope of dampening the insurgency and bringing Sunnis into the political process.

- snip -

The article includes this list:

Among the recent incidents of sectarian violence and apparent retaliation:

Ten clerics, both Sunnis and Shias, have been killed over the past two weeks in and around Baghdad. Several of the clerics were abducted, and their bullet-riddled bodies were discovered days later.

MORE

- snip -

And this list:

A wave of violence

Attacks in Iraq this year have overwhelmingly targeted Shias, although violence of recent weeks indicates Shias are beginning to retaliate.

Tuesday (May 17): Two car bombs explode minutes apart in a Shia section of Baghdad, killing nine soldiers, wounding five others and causing an unspecified number of civilian casualties.

MORE