BAGHDAD, 29 July 2007 — Friction between Iraq’s Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish leaders has erupted into a public spat over who is to blame for the failure so far to enact any of the laws that Washington hopes will reconcile Iraqis.

While US officials have pressured Shiite Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s government — a brittle coalition of Shiites, Kurds and Sunni Arabs — to move faster, the latest bout of finger-pointing highlights the political gridlock.

Government spokesman Ali Al-Dabbagh on Friday accused the biggest Sunni political bloc, the Accordance Front, of blackmail and obstruction, while President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, suggested the Front harbored insurgent sympathizers.

The Front sparked the war of words on Wednesday when it pulled its ministers out of Maliki’s government and gave him a week to meet a series of demands, including a greater say in security matters.

Sunni ministers are boycotting government business, and the deepening crisis has cast doubt on the US-backed regime’s ability to push through reforms designed to reunite the war-torn country.

Washington has demanded that series of law and constitutional amendments be passed to appease Sunni resentment and end faction fighting, as the program was supposed to proceed alongside a surge of US troops into the country.

The main Sunni bloc in the coalition yesterday reacted angrily to a rebuke from Maliki’s spokesman, who had accused its ministers of disrupting legislation and had implied they were corrupt.

“The Iraqi Concord Front rejects and strongly condemns the statement of the official government spokesman and the lies and the insinuations and attacks on people known for their integrity,” the Front said in a statement.

It came one day after Maliki’s spokesman Ali Al-Dabbagh launched his withering attack on the Sunni bloc, which holds 44 seats in Parliament but has withdrawn its six ministers from the government.

“The politics of threats, of pressure, and of blackmail will not work, and crippling the work of the government and the parliament and the political process will not return Iraq to the days of dictatorship,” Dabbagh said.

This situation “does not benefit the people of Iraq, but those who fill their bank accounts outside the country by benefiting from the politics of complaining, crying, and begging in the name of this sect or that,” he added. The crisis erupted on Wednesday when the Front expanded its boycott of Cabinet meetings to a full withdrawal from the government, giving Maliki a week to meet the Sunni ministers’ list of demands.

The Concord Front has accused the government of failing to rein in Shiite militias, many of which are allied to major Shiite parties, and of arbitrary arrests of Sunni citizens, charges the government denies.

That both sides accuse the other of being openly sectarian is a measure of how toxic Iraqi political life has become in recent months despite pressure from Washington to resolve the country’s underlying conflicts.

“Everyone is sectarian — that’s the problem,” according to Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s chief Iraqi analyst. “The secular middle of professionals and others who didn’t consider themselves Sunni or Shiite ... they have disappeared.”

Lawmakers from other parties are divided over who is to blame and what kind of impact the schism would have on progress toward political reconciliation. “Concord’s statement was surprising, and so was the government’s. Both of them were hasty and harsh, and announced openly through the media,” Kurdish MP Mahmoud Othman said.

“There is a continuous state of distrust between the two sides, but it is better to hold meetings and to find solutions.” Others were more critical of the Front’s boycott. “This stance reveals the real internal crisis the Concord Front suffers from, a crisis with the Iraqi street which it says it defends,” Izzat Al-Shabender of the secular Iraqi National List told AFP.

“The Front is not in an enviable situation. Its withdrawal will affect the government severely because it is a key partner. This may bring down the government,” he added.

The Front’s Sunni ministers launched a boycott of Maliki’s coalition government after an arrest warrant was issued in June for Culture Minister Asaad Kamal Al-Hashemi. He is accused of plotting to kill fellow Sunni MP Mithal Alussi in an ambush in February 2005.