IRAQ: Mortar fire killed 15 people and shooting erupted around two Baghdad mosques yesterday, but pleas for unity and a third day of curfew in the city seemed to dampen sectarian violence that has pitched Iraq toward civil war.
Five killed in a minibus, teenagers gunned down playing soccer and two US soldiers were among 30 deaths, a lower toll than other days since a suspected al-Qaeda bomb at a Shia shrine sparked reprisals on minority Sunnis and the biggest test of Iraq's survival as a unified state since the US invasion.
Well over 200 people have been killed since Wednesday and the defence minister has warned of an "endless civil war".
After taking calls from US president George Bush, who hopes stability can let him start bringing 136,000 US troops home, Iraqi leaders met late on Saturday to issue a televised midnight appeal for calm and renew pledges to form a unity government.
Religious leaders, including Shia militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, joined the calls. Al-Sadr, a rising force in the ruling but fractious Shia Alliance, told a rally in Basra his followers would hold joint prayer services at Sunni mosques damaged in violence.
A bomb later caused damage at a Shia mosque in Basra and gunfire rattled around two Sunni mosques in Baghdad after dark.
"We have passed the danger period, the security situation is now 80 per cent stable," said Ridha Jawad al-Taqi, a senior official in SCIRI, the biggest of the Shia Islamist parties, which also runs a 20,000-strong armed wing, the Badr movement.
"The violence seems to be diminishing," Mr Bush's national security adviser Stephen Hadley told CBS television. "They've stared into the abyss a bit. I think they've all concluded that further violence . . . is not in their interests."
Fifteen people died and 45 were wounded when scattered mortar rounds hit mostly religiously mixed areas of Baghdad. Some also hit a Shia area.
Frightened Shia families fled the violent and mostly Sunni suburb of Abu Ghraib in the west of Baghdad, fearing their neighbours were about to turn on them.
Five people died when a bomb destroyed a minibus as it left a bus station in Hilla, a Shia town surrounded by Sunni villages south of Baghdad, the regional police spokesman said.
Gunmen in a car fired on teenage boys playing soccer in a mixed area of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, killing two and wounding five in what police described as a sectarian attack.
Two US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in western Baghdad.
Following Mr Bush's calls on Saturday, Shia prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari made a televised appeal, flanked by Sunni and Kurdish politicians, to Iraqis not to turn on each other.
Loyalty to the government over ethnic and sectarian ties would be tested in any conflict, leaving heavily armed US forces holding the ring, resented on both sides but also widely acknowledged as vital to preventing a descent into deeper chaos. - (Reuters)