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Baghdad blasts break Friday's brief calm

"The situation with sectarian violence in Baghdad is very serious."

John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command

Explosions rattled the Iraqi capital yesterday after a day of relative calm as the US moved to bolster troop strength in Baghdad to cope with escalating violence between Sunnis and Shiites.

Two large blasts -- both in east Baghdad -- occurred at midmorning within about 20 minutes. One civilian was killed in one of the blasts, which targeted an Iraqi police patrol. The other explosion occurred at the Rasheed military camp but there were no casualty reports.

US and Iraqi troops sealed off an area of east Baghdad following the blasts and systematically searched homes and shops looking for weapons.

The blasts shattered a brief calm as an extended ban on private vehicles held down violence on Friday following one of the most violent weeks in the capital this year. But the ban expired on Friday evening and within hour, heavy bursts of automatic weapons fire were heard around Firdous Square.

Scattered bombings and shootings were reported elsewhere in the capital.

The deteriorating security situation in Baghdad has alarmed US officials, who had hoped that the new national unity government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would be able to ease tensions so that the US and its international partners could begin removing troops this year.

But the situation has gotten worse since al-Maliki took office on May 20.

The Baghdad area recorded an average of 34 major bombings and shootings for the week ending July 13, the US military said. That was up 40 percent from the daily average of 24 registered for last month.

Much of the violence was due to sectarian attacks. Months of worsening violence has heightened tensions between Shiites and Sunnis and deepened the distrust between Iraq's two main religious communities.

Instead of cutbacks, a senior US defense official said the Pentagon is moving ahead with scheduled deployments to Iraq next month and is moving one battalion to Baghdad from Kuwait where it was in reserve, US officials said.

The US command had drawn up plans to reduce the number of US combat brigades in Iraq from 14 to 12 by September. But that plan has been shelved for the time being because of the security crisis in the capital.

"The situation with sectarian violence in Baghdad is very serious," General John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command, said in an interview on Friday with the New York Times. "The country can deal with the insurgency better than it can with the sectarian violence, and it needs to move decisively against the sectarian violence now."

In related news, police in Mosul killed three gunmen in a firefight yesterday in the north of the city and recovered a quantity of wea-pons. An Iraqi soldier was killed when a bomb exploded outside his home in Hillah, 95km south of Baghdad, police said.
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