Iraq state of emergency extended

Iraq’s parliament voted on today to extend Iraq’s state of emergency through December, but the US military warned of even worse sectarian violence after last week’s deadly insurgent attack on Shiites in Baghdad.

Iraq’s parliament voted on today to extend Iraq’s state of emergency through December, but the US military warned of even worse sectarian violence after last week’s deadly insurgent attack on Shiites in Baghdad.

Lawmakers decided to continue the state of emergency that allows for a nighttime curfew and gives the government extra powers to make arrests without warrants and launch police and military operations.

The measures, in place everywhere except for the northern autonomous Kurdish region, have been renewed every month since they were first authorised in November 2004.

By early evening, bombings, shootings and other attacks in Iraq had killed at least nine Iraqis and wounded 47, police said. The bodies of nine civilians who had been kidnapped and tortured also were discovered, including five that had been dumped at a bus station or outside a government building.

Citing the insurgent attack that killed more than 200 people in the capital’s Sadr City Shiite slum on Thursday, Maj Gen William B Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said al-Qaida in Iraq is determined to dominate Baghdad, weaken the Iraqi government and kill as many Shiites as possible to deepen Iraq’s sectarian divisions.

“We expect to see elevated levels of violence as a result of this over the next several weeks,” Caldwell said at a news conference in the Green Zone, the heavily fortified section of Baghdad where the Iraqi government and the US and British embassies are based.

He also said that while recent polling has indicated that a large majority of Iraqis feel more loyalty to their democratically elected government than to their sect, ethnic group or tribe, “these numbers by themselves do little to counter the violence currently raging on Baghdad’s streets”.

Meanwhile, videotape footage obtained by AP Television News appears to show the wreckage of a US single-seat F-16CG jet in the farm field where it crashed yesterday and the remains of an American serviceman with a tangled parachute nearby.

U.S. forces investigating the crash said that insurgents had reached the site before American forces could and the pilot is missing.

Al-Jazeera satellite television showed similar pictures yesterday, but declined to include the scenes of the dead pilot, saying they were too graphic to air.

The US Air Force jet crashed about 20 miles north west of Baghdad while supporting extensive ground combat by coalition forces in Anbar province, where many of Iraq’s Sunni-Arab insurgent groups operate, the Air Combat Command said.

Fighter jets flying overhead when the crash occurred “confirmed that insurgents were in the vicinity of the crash site immediately following the crash,” the command said. When US soldiers reached the area, “The pilot was not found at the crash site and his status cannot be confirmed at this time.”

DNA samples were taken from the scene and were being tested, it said.

The F-16 was deployed to the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Balad Air Base in Iraq.

Caldwell told reporters there is no indication the plane was shot down.

Fighting on the ground in Anbar province killed a US Marine yesterday, raising to at least 2,881 the number of members of the American military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Today’s worst attacks by suspected insurgents included two car bombs that exploded near a hospital morgue in Baghdad, killing three civilians and one policeman and wounding 19 civilians, police said.

In Diyala province north of the capital, where heavy fighting between police and Sunni insurgents has raged for several days, a roadside bomb exploded in the town of Baladrooz, killing three civilians and wounding four, a police officer said. He also spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his security.

North of Diyala, an Iraqi governor survived an assassination attempt when a suicide bomber blew himself up near the official’s convoy. The attacker with an explosive belt hidden beneath his clothing approached the convoy as it was driving slowly through the center of Kirkuk near the city’s main public hospital, police said. The man tried to enter the governor’s car, but when the door was locked he blew himself up.

Governor Abdul Rahman Mustafa and his bodyguards were not harmed, but the powerful blast hit civilians standing nearby, killing one of them and wounding 17, police said.

Meanwhile, public anger appeared to remain strong in Sadr City, which is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a key backer of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

More than 2,000 Sadrists marched through the slum to mark the seventh anniversary of the assassination of the cleric’s father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a revered Shiite religious leader.

“Thursday’s attack was another attempt by the terrorists who killed Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr to destroy Sadr City and his followers,” said Hazim al-Araji, an aide to Muqtada al-Sadr. “Despite the severe casualties we just suffered, we were determined to hold today’s ceremony.”

Al-Maliki will meet with U.S. President George W. Bush in neighboring Jordan this week to discuss the surge of sectarian violence that threatens to push Iraq into a full-scale civil war.

Today, al-Malikia and some of his Cabinet ministers met in Baghdad with the Kurdish region’s powerful president, Massoud Barzani, and Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of Kurdistan’s regional government, to discuss developments in the political process and the efforts of national reconciliation and reconstruction projects. One goal was to strengthen economic coordination between the central government and the Kurdish Autonomous government.

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