The United States told Iraq's leaders in stern language on Wednesday they must act swiftly to halt a surge in attacks by both Sunnis and Shias that the United Nations said risks pitching the nation into civil war.
On a day of more gun attacks, bombings and the kidnap of 19 Sunni mosque officials, the US ambassador and US commander in Iraq implicitly blamed Shia and Sunni groups respectively for two major attacks that killed some 120 people this week.
In a blunt statement, Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey condemned "terrorists" and "death squads" and said: "We call on Iraqi leaders to take responsibility and pursue reconciliation not just in words, but through deeds as well."
With the casualty count climbing to some 100 civilian deaths a day by a UN estimate, Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki goes to Washington next week, where officials hope he can help them convince American voters that Iraq is turning a corner.
But Iraqi politicians and diplomats increasingly question the resolve of the Shias, Sunnis and Kurds in the cabinet to set aside partisan aims to stop a bloody break-up of the nation.
Maliki has called his two-month-old government's national reconciliation plan a "last chance" for peace and his foreign minister said on Wednesday that their coalition had just months to prove itself. He warned of "full sectarian war" if it failed. Also outspoken after the recent violence was UN envoy Ashraf Qazi, whose office endorsed figures this week suggesting some 6,000 Iraqi civilians died in May and June alone.
"We hope there will be no civil war in Iraq," Qazi told reporters in Baghdad. "Although the reality right now is that there is a very high degree of violence." "It threatens to erode the government's authority."
President George W. Bush's administration is hoping for signs of political and economic progress in Iraq that might help the ruling Republicans in November's congressional elections and raise hopes that it can start withdrawing American troops.
Though Maliki announced a first meeting of a reconciliation panel on Saturday that he said would feature former opponents of the US-sponsored political process, there is little substance as yet to a programme of compromises he outlined a month ago. The US statement was notable in sharing out blame. In familiar language, it accused Sunni insurgents like al Qaeda of fomenting civil war with a suicide car bomb attack that killed nearly 60 in the Shia city of Kufa on Tuesday.
But it blamed "death squads", a term officials have used for Shia militiamen, for a gun and grenade attack on a market at Mahmudiya near Baghdad on Monday that killed a similar number.
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