Situation in Southern Iraq becomes grim. Shi'a now killing each other.

The Shiite-on-Shiite struggle for Iraq's economically important south has taken a violent turn.

Qadisiyah Province's governor was killed by a roadside bomb over the weekend, clashes in Basra Province killed at least three, and tensions are rising in Najaf as figures close to the senior Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani have been targeted in a wave of assassinations.

"We are going to witness an escalation of this conflict ... the Shiites were never united, the question now is who's going to represent the Shiites," says Mustafa al-Ani, an analyst with the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.

The widening split among Shiites parallels the national Iraqi political fissures. On Sunday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for meetings to begin Monday with the country's main political leaders to fix the national political paralysis.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070813/wl_csm/oshiitefight_1

:sarcasm:

(my apologies)