AMMAN, 8 May 2005 — Jordan’s King Abdallah yesterday pledged to help Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in his country’s fight against “terror” as the neighbors sought to end a sharp rift over Jordanian involvement in insurgent attacks. Following talks with Talabani, on his first trip abroad since taking office last month, Abdullah stressed Jordan’s determination “to place all its resources at Iraq’s service particularly training security (Iraqi) personnel,” said a palace statement.

“Jordan will not accept any act which harms the Iraqi people and its political leadership.” Talabani was accompanied by Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a fellow Kurd, and ambassador Ata Abdul Wahab, who was returning to Amman after a six-week absence for consultations.

The reported involvement of a Jordanian in a suicide bombing that killed 118 people in the Shiite city of Hilla in late February sparked a wave of demonstrations against the Sunni kingdom that saw Jordanian flags and portraits of King Abdullah torched. Jordan recalled its ambassador for consultations but sent him back even after Iraq announced it was withdrawing Abdul Wahab in a tit for tat move.

Jordan “stands firmly next to Iraq in its struggle against terrorism, terrorists and all who support them,” said the statement. Talabani, meanwhile, expressed “Iraq’s determination to develop and reinforce relations between the two countries.” He praised “Jordan’s position in the fight against terrorism, a pest that affects not only Iraq but the whole region,” the palace quoted him as saying.

A series of warnings issued by Abdallah about the dangers of empowering Iraq’s Shiite majority have cast a shadow over relations between the two neighbors that were close under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime.

Meanwhile, the murder of 14 Sunni Arabs from the same clan, in an apparent retaliation for a string of anti-Shiite attacks south of Baghdad, has heightened fears that Shiite militias could take up arms and precipitate a civil conflict in Iraq. The past few days have seen an unprecedented series of tit for tat attacks between the two communities.

The latest anti-Shiite attack was a car bomb that targeted a vegetable market in the mixed town of Suwayrah, south of Baghdad, that left 16 people dead and 52 wounded. “The goal is to kill as many Shiites as possible. These were Salafists (Sunni fundamentalists), who live in the nearby village of Khomeirat, and want to spark a civil war,” Suwayrah policeman Hussein Khudair told AFP.

Extremist Sunni groups with ties to the insurgency have claimed responsibility for many anti-Shiite attacks, but Shiite clerics had so far kept a lid on calls for revenge. But on Friday, the bodies of 12 Sunni farmers, all belonging to the Dulaimi tribe, were discovered buried in a hastily dug pit on the edge of the radical Baghdad Shiite stronghold of Sadr City.

According to police, the victims had their hands tied and were blindfolded, with a bullet each to the back of the head. A morgue employee said the bodies of two other people from the same group were brought to him yesterday. Relatives said the farmers, from the town of Madain on a lawless stretch between Baghdad and Suwayrah, had come to the capital to sell their produce and were sleeping in a Sadr City market when they were abducted.

“Three Opel cars and a Land Cruiser the same color as police vehicles arrived at one o’clock on Thursday. There were many people dressed as policemen. I was sleeping on the roof, they didn’t notice me,” said Saadi Abdul Abbas, a surviving farmer from the same group. “My relatives were sleeping. These men arrived and started waking them up by hitting them and kicking them. They tied their hands and blindfolded them and whisked them away,” he told AFP.