BAGHDAD, 18 May 2005 — Insurgents have assassinated three clerics in Baghdad in an escalating wave of violence that authorities fear is aimed at sparking civil war. Al-Qaeda’s wing in Iraq also warned the country’s Sunni Arabs to take no part in drafting a new constitution, in another sign militants are trying to fuel sectarian tensions. Guerrillas shot two Shiite clerics in Baghdad yesterday. Mani Hassan, a member of a leading Shiite Islamist party, was killed outside his house, and Muwaffaq Mansour was ambushed in his car.
The body of Hassan Nuaimi, a member of the Sunni Muslim Clerics Association, was also found in Baghdad yesterday, a day after the group accused the Dominated-dominated government of state terrorism and ignoring the killings of Sunnis. The violence raged as Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi was set to meet Iraqi leaders during a trip to Baghdad. Kharrazi is the most senior Iranian official to visit Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein two years ago.
Some Sunni Arabs, suspicious of Iran after the Iran-Iraq War, are worried that the Shiite Islamists’ victory in Jan. 30 elections will give Tehran a chance to influence Iraqi affairs. Islamist Shiites and Kurds, long oppressed under Saddam Hussein, won control of Parliament in the polls and the Sunni Arab minority that dominated during Saddam’s rule was sidelined.
Guerrilla attacks have killed more than 400 people since Iraq’s new government was announced three weeks ago. Most of the dead were killed by a surge in suicide bombings.
In another assassination in Baghdad, guerrillas killed Alaidin Al-Ubaidi, an engineer working for the Commission on Public Integrity, which probes corruption in Iraq. On Sunday, gunmen in eastern Baghdad killed Qasim Al-Gharrawi, a cleric who was the local representative of Iraq’s most revered Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister and one-time Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi said in remarks published in Amman yesterday that he rejected a royal amnesty as a way to resolve a fraud conviction against him in Jordan. “A pardon means I’m guilty, but what I’m seeking is another trial in a civil court and in accordance with the Jordanian law,” Chalabi told Ad-Dustour, Jordan’s second largest daily newspaper.
Chalabi, who was appointed a deputy prime minister in the Iraqi government that took office in early May, was convicted in absentia in 1992 by a Jordanian military court of embezzlement, fraud and breach of trust after a bank he ran collapsed with about $300 million in missing deposits.
